Acts 4:23-37

by Daniel Harrell

Acts 4:1-22

by Daniel Harrell

With the Titanic Centennial having sunk back below the surface, it is time to recognize another 100^th Anniversary, that of the “lyric little bandbox” known as Fenway Park (yesterday’s disaster of a game against the Yankees notwithstanding. Thankfully they’ve got the Twins starting tomorrow.). My thanks to Rob Kirsch for bringing me a commemorative copy of the Boston Globe. And my greetings to Boston friends here today, one of whom works for the Globe. They’re visiting their daughter at Carleton. I don’t know if you caught any of the Fenway Centennial celebration on Friday. Every former Red Sox player was invited back, with over 200 of them emerging onto that ancient field of dreams: Carleton Fisk, Jim Rice, Pedro Martinez and of course Carl Yastrzemski, Bobby Doerr among so many others. I had the pleasure of being there for 25 of those hundred years, mostly as a guest of the team itself. For years the Red Sox passed out free admission to ministers. You’ve never seen a city with more ordained people. I’m sure the free pass was out of deference to the Kennedys and the Catholic priesthood, but we Protestants were more than happy to go Roman if it got us into Fenway.

The team held chapel before Sunday’s games and customarily invited a local Reverend to bring some inspiration—Lord knows they’ve needed it. I don’t ever remember being as nervous as I was when my turn came. I read some Scripture, gave a short meditation and then said a prayer, after which I went and did the same for the visiting team who had to have their chapel in the shower room (it was the only space available). I’d like to think that the Holy Spirit calmed my nerves, giving me the worlds to say like with Peter here in Acts 4. All I can say is that the Red Sox did go on to win the World Series for the first time in 86 years. Pedro Martinez also came to a service at our church, though I don’t know what the Holy Spirit did to him. I do know he didn’t tithe. Our treasurer would have noticed that.

If Peter and John were nervous before the Jewish ruling Sanhedrin, they didn’t show it. Jesus promised them back in Luke that because of him they’d get dragged before the authorities, but not to worry about it, “the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.” Peter and John’s only crime was healing a panhandler who’d been crippled from birth. When he begged Peter and John for money, he given his legs back instead. Calling on the name of Jesus, Peter commanded the crippled beggar to rise up and walk, using the sweet language of resurrection. The man rose up and danced and gave glory to God, astonishing the crowd who marveled at the surge of power. It was much more impressive than the surgeon was able to do with my knee. I’ll not be dancing for a few weeks yet. Modern medicine is amazing, but it’s not miraculous.

Peter went on to hit a homerun sermon—his third in Acts—and church membership exploded to more than 5000. However, the gospel’s popularity with the people threatened the religious establishment, especially the Sadducees who get special mention here because they did not believe in the resurrection. This is what made the Sadducees so sad, you see. They were a by-the-book bunch who rejected the resurrection on the grounds that they couldn’t find it explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament—even though there are lots of hints. The Sadducees were also a practical bunch, choosing to cozy up to the Romans for the sake of the benefits (much like baseball-loving Protestant ministers did in Boston). And they were well-heeled. The Sadducees controlled the Sanhedrin by virtue of their pedigree, a privileged DNA stretching back to Israel’s bluest blood.

We read that they were “much annoyed” about Peter’s sermon—we preachers can relate. But it was the real life application that really got their gevalt. It’s one thing to preach Jesus heals. It’s another thing to do it on the spot. If the Sadducees didn’t nip this in the bud, they’d lose their entire membership to this upstart church plant.

As the ruling aristocracy with political power, the Sadducees had the authority to haul in Peter and John for questioning, just like they’d done with Jesus back in the gospels. Peter had crumpled up like a Kleenex that time, but now filled with the Spirit, he was both bold and brassy. His newfound nerve was nothing to sneeze at. He stepped up to the plate and said to the Sadducees: “You’ve locked us up because of a good deed done to someone who was sick? And now you want to know by whose name we did it?”

Peter told them, of course: “Jesus of Nazareth, whom you killed, but whom God raised from the dead” (sticking it to the Sadducees one more time). Peter went on to quote their own Bible: “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, has become the cornerstone.” The religious establishment had likely understood this stone from Psalm 118 to be referring to them, the rejected nation of Israel, a small rock of a people whom God would make into the cornerstone of creation. But Peter reinterpreted the Psalm in light of Jesus. As their Messiah, Jesus single-handedly fulfilled Israel’s destiny. Because God’s chosen people failed to keep faithful, God kept faith for them in Christ. All they had to do now was to believe in Jesus as their true Cornerstone. Reject him instead, and things would end up as Jesus predicted when he quoted Psalm 118 in Luke’s gospel. “Everyone who stumbles over the stone will be broken to pieces, and it will crush anyone it falls on.”

Peter put this same message in different words here in verse 12: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” There is a double meaning here. “Saved” means both “restored to health” and “resurrected to life.” Again, it’s why Peter told the crippled beggar to rise up and walk. Peter deftly moves from the restored physical health of the panhandler, to address the sad spiritual health of the Sanhedrin.

Christians struggle with this verse. It brings up the sticky doctrine of Christian exclusivism, the assertion that Jesus is the only way to God; inappropriate for our pluralistic and more tolerant times. It’s Jesus fault. He’s the one who drew the line: “no one comes to the Father except through me.”

It may be helpful to remember that at this point in the Biblical narrative, salvation is solely a Jewish concern. As I mentioned last Sunday, there are no Christians yet in the non-Jewish sense of that word. So far, only Jews believed in Jesus. Only Jews, for the most part, had ever heard of Jesus. Even Peter, bold and brassy as he was about sharing the gospel here with the Jewish leaders, doesn’t say a word to non-Jews for six more chapters. Gentiles were unclean. Peter never would have said anything to them had God not given him that vision with the sheet full of non-kosher animals from heaven and declared them fit to eat. A voice will say to Peter, speaking of Gentiles, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” The gospel welcomes the whole world to the table. This passage isn’t so much about the exclusivity of Jesus as it is about the identity of Jesus as Israel’s Savior, the one their Scriptures had promised and their hearts had longed for. And the one through whom all the world would come to God.

Jesus may be the only road to God, but many roads lead to Jesus. Nobody was more surprised about this than Peter once it became clear that the Holy Spirit had come upon Gentiles too. “And since God gave them the same gift he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ,” Peter declared, “who am I to stand in the way of what God is doing?” –be that the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, life everlasting, all things made new, or that inclusive multitude from Revelation that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, worshipping together in one voice, singing, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

Certainly the Sadducees did not appreciate Peter taking them to school like this. Who was he to preach to them? They had their pedigree and their seminary degrees, he had his fishing license. But what could they say? What could they do? Peter delivered the better sermon. He made a lame man walk. He had the Spirit. But they had the political power. So they ordered him to keep quiet and say no more about Jesus. However, keeping a Spirit-filled preacher quiet is like trying to keep the wind from blowing. Peter replied, “You’ll have to judge whether it’s right in God’s sight for us to listen to you instead of Him. How can we keep quiet about what we’ve seen and heard?” Scoring them points for their courage, and concerned about inciting a popular riot, the Sadducees just let them go.

Peter and John’s boldness made an impression on the Sanhedrin, and it impresses me too. Theirs was an act of moral courage—something you don’t see a lot of anymore. Sure, we see occasional acts of bravery now and then: the New Jersey mayor who rushes into a burning apartment building, the Minnesota State Trooper who lined up tractor trailers to break the fall of a suicidal man. But then again, we’ve taken to calling baseball ballplayers who dive for line drives “courageous.” On the other hand, it’s rare to see acts of moral courage, like that American Airlines CEO who resigned rather than file bankruptcy because he didn’t think it right to use the law to avoid financial obligations to workers. Or the Goldman Sachs fund manager who publically resigned on the Opinion Pages of the New York Times because he could no longer in good conscience work for a firm that so devalued its customers.

Even more rare, and less admired, are acts of courage staked out explicitly because of one’s Christian faith: be it the public rejection of violence and cruelty, the deep suspicion of worldly wealth and power, the insistence on chastity, monogamy, and fidelity in personal relationships, the resolve to forgive at all costs. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson asserts that such acts of faithful courage suffer due to what she calls “the tyranny of petty coercion.” Courage,” she writes, “is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient cultural consensus to support it.” This is why people are generally so quiet about being believers. Coming clean about one’s Christianity is un-cool, unless you can play football like Tim Tebow, or dribble like Jeremy Lin, or pitch with a bloody sock like Curt Schilling (who by the way didn’t show up at Fenway Park on Friday). Take away the celebrity, and it’s hard to do the Jesus thing acceptably in America.

Marilynne Robinson’s friends, who know she’s a Christian, poke fun about her being “born again.” They try to rescue her with little lectures about her religion being a cheap cure for existential anxiety. Is she not worried about the embarrassing associations? The assumption that she’s a Jesus freak in cahoots with the lunatic fringes? The fundamentalist home-schoolers and the science-deniers? Though Robinson has spent decades immersed in the virtues of her faith, virtues she’ll carry to her deathbed, she admits being affected by these little coercions. Trivial failures of courage in response, keeping quiet about what you believe because it is un-cool and uncomfortable, may seem minor enough in any particular instance. And yet they have changed history and society. Martin Luther. John Calvin. William Wilberforce. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rosa Parks. Chuck Colson. Even Tim Tebow. Robinson writes how “cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage.” Abdications of conscience can never be trivial.

Who would have ever imagined a faithful band of uneducated fishermen upending the Roman Empire? Who would have ever thought that individuals convinced of the resurrection enough to die for it would shape all of Western civilization, law, economics, art and science? Even now, courageous believers in China and Indonesia and throughout Africa are subversively reforming governments and shaping a new status quo. “How can we keep quiet about what we have seen and heard?” Peter’s rhetorical question still applies.

Not that I am very courageous myself. Even as a professional Christian, I can be pretty quiet about Jesus in public. I’d like to say that I’m reluctant to talk about my faith because it can’t be reduced to simple statements; but mostly it’s because I feel those petty coercions too. I keep quiet even though the dangers I face are pretty insignificant—a little ridicule here, a slight professional disadvantage there, some awkward silence now and then. Never mind that Jesus said if I’m ashamed of him and his words “in this adulterous and sinful generation,” he’ll be ashamed of me “when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

I want to be more courageous. Or at least less ashamed. Maybe that means refusing to take offense when people say things I don’t like. Or better yet, refusing to participate in the offending things that get said about others. Maybe it’s choosing to be more generous than I usually am, or volunteering more time to people who might need me. Maybe it’s choosing to do the right thing instead of the easy thing, to support a just cause, to stand up for the disadvantaged, to say something un-cool. And then when people ask me why I act like I act, I can come clean about my faith in a way that brings glory to that name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and tongue confess he is Lord. If Jesus is Lord, how can we keep quiet?

Acts 3:1-26

by Daniel Harrell

Mark 16:1-8

by Daniel Harrell

I stand before you this Easter morning because I did not win the Mega Millions jackpot. No 640 million dollars for me! I know, I’m supposed to tell you that my life would not have changed had I won. Lottery winners always say that. It’s what the three actual winners will probably tell you if they ever go public. But life always changes for lottery winners—and not always for the better. Take Jack Whittaker who was a wealthy businessman already when he won what was at the time the largest jackpot ever by a single ticket: $315M on Christmas Day, 2002. After collecting his winnings, $113M after taxes, Whittaker was sued for bouncing checks at Atlantic City casinos; was ordered to undergo rehab after being arrested on drunken driving charges; had his vehicles and business burglarized; was drugged in a strip club by robbers who took more than $500,000 from his car; was sued by the father of an 18-year-old boyfriend of his granddaughter found dead in his house from a drug overdose, and most recently sued by a woman who claims Whittaker assaulted her. Regarding his lottery win, Whittaker said, “I wish I’d torn that ticket up.”

Even responsible winners have ended up miserable. One couple took home a cool million dollar prize, paid their taxes and deposited the rest into a retirement fund. But due to the publicity, they got hounded relentlessly by get-a-lifers wanting them to participate in all kinds of questionable investment schemes and causes. Folks grabbed at them on the streets hoping some of their good luck might rub off. Others, so-called “lotto snobs,” turned up their noses in disdain at the couple’s fate, verbally deriding them for being so fortunate. And yet, despite countless more stories like these, millions of people still buy lottery tickets. $1.5 billion was spent to win that huge Mega Millions jackpot. Households earning less than $13,000 a year reportedly shockingly spend 9% of their income on these games—games they most always lose.

As for me, I can honestly say that my life couldn’t have changed by winning Mega Millions because I didn’t play. I wish I could honestly say this was because of my righteous lottery scruples, but it actually has more to do with how the lottery messed with my head the one time I did play it. I picked some numbers once when the payout was a big one, knowing full well I had no real chance to win. I held tight to my ticket though, fantasizing about how I’d blow my windfall, the luxuries I’d splurge on, the places I’d go, all the envy I’d generate. I amassed enough imaginary plans to work myself into a tight neurotic knot, glued to the TV in a compulsive sweat on the night the numbers were revealed. Not a single one showed up on my ticket. The letdown was dramatic and hard. I sat there stunned and dismayed, all my dreams of glory reduced to a worthless scrap of paper. I was embarrassed for misplacing my faith onto something that could never have done anything but disappoint me. It was a pathetic display I swore then and there I’d never repeat.

Was this how it was for the disciples who put all their money down on Jesus? Watching their own dreams of glory vaporize with his arrest, does this explain why Peter, who was Jesus’ best friend, denied ever knowing who Jesus was? Remember that story? Jesus gets hauled in for questioning, accused of being blasphemous and seditious, a threat to Rome for calling himself King and a threat to God for saying he was God’s only son. Jesus performed all sorts of fancy tricks and made all kinds of fancy promises about moving mountains and answering prayer and then rising from dead. And gullible Peter had been taken in like so many others. He’d left his wife and kids and house and job to follow this pretender. And for what? I bet he wished he’d torn up his ticket. It was a pathetic display which he swore three times he’d never do again.

At least Jesus was dead now. He couldn’t delude anybody anymore. No more misplaced faith. No more false hopes. No more dashed dreams. Granted, there’s a bunch of silly women still feeling sorry for him. They show up at the graveyard to pay their respects. But clearly they didn’t believe any of that crazy “rising from the dead” talk. You don’t show up in a graveyard with burial spices if you’re not looking for a corpse.

What were the odds of somebody being raised from the dead anyway? Better than the odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot? Lottery officials placed those odds at 176M to one. What kind of ridiculous odds are those? Perhaps you caught the story of the Wichita, Kansas, man who bought his Mega Millions ticket and then joked to a friend how he had a better chance of getting struck by lightning than he did of winning the jackpot. Then he walked out into his backyard and got struck by lightening. BOOM!—a powerful jolt knocked him flat to the ground, sent his heart to thumping and scared the living daylights out of him.

Sort of like the angel did to these unsuspecting women in Mark’s version of the Easter story. Mark doesn’t explicitly say “angel,” but his description of a “young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side” of the empty tomb is only missing the halo and wings. The angel told the women to “fear not.” Angels always say that. The stunned women tremulously tip toe backwards, away from the empty tomb, their hearts thumping, their eyes and mouths wide with panic. This was not what they were expecting. The angel asked if they’re looking for the crucified Jesus, but then adds the obvious, the words you came to church to hear this morning: “He’s not here. He has been raised. Go tell his disciples. Even Peter. He’ll meet you in Galilee like he told you he would.” Even Peter. I’ll say this for Jesus. He’s loyal. He specifically remembers Peter even after Peter did everything he could to forget him.

The women, however, were too terrified to tell anybody anything. Mark reports that “they fled and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And that’s it. End of story. End of gospel. Happy Easter. Now go have brunch.

Mark’s abrupt Easter ending reminds me of one summer vacation with my family. We decided to take advantage of a beautiful Cape Cod evening and grill lobsters outside. The house where we stayed had this huge brick gas grill, but I neglected to check whether the tank was low on propane. It was. There was enough gas to get the grill lit, just not enough to keep it lit. Thinking it was heating up, I got the lobsters prepped, popped a cold one, set the table. My mom and sister, the women in this story, joined me on the patio to enjoy the sun set. Meanwhile, the grill flame flickered out. But fumes from the tank still collected underneath the grill lid. Noting that the thermostat registered zero, I absent-mindedly pushed the automatic igniter a few more times to see if I could get it going again and… BOOM!! The lid blew off, followed by flying iron grates that whizzed past my sister’s head. My mom’s mouth fell open and her eyes bugged out at the blast. The rest of the family came barreling down from the house, including a neighbor from a block away who had heard the explosion. My wife Dawn remained inside, bracing herself for her pending widowhood. But I was not dead. I was raised! Well, the hair on my head was raised. And my eyebrows were singed off. Soot and grease splattered my face. It scared the living daylights out of everybody. But we were still hungry. So we ordered pizza.

And that’s it. First fear, then food. The end.

Naturally the early church couldn’t tolerate such a non-ending to a gospel, so somebody decided to cobble together a more fitting conclusion. Twelve and a half extra verses which your pew Bible labels with parentheses as “the shorter” and “longer” endings for Mark. The cut-and-paste job on Mark features Mary Magdalene being possessed by seven demons. Jesus appears to a couple of his followers out for a country walk, a take-off on Luke’s road to Emmaus story. The part I like best is where the risen Jesus shows up while his disciples are having pizza and raises heck at them for their having been such weenies. He says if they’ll just have a little faith going forward, they’ll be able to pick up snakes, drink deadly poison and heal the sick. Of course you’d need to be able to heal the sick if you start playing with snakes and drinking poison.

Scholars who argue for the authenticity of these verses go on to suggest that there’s likely more where these came from. Who knows? Maybe there’s a missing verse where Jesus says he was only kidding, you don’t really have to love your enemies. Or another one where he says you can keep all your possessions for yourself, worshipping God and money together works just fine after all. (But we already knew that, didn’t we?)

Why does Mark end so abruptly? And why end with fear? Why is no word the last word? There are a number of places in the gospels where Jesus does instruct his followers to keep quiet. The thought is that since they didn’t really get what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah yet, they’d best wait until after the resurrection before spreading the news. That’s what Jesus told them to do. Jesus had grown immensely popular by the time Holy Week rolled around, huge crowds mobbed him everywhere. They were ready to crown him King. They wanted some more miracles. But unlike comic book Mega Messiahs, Jesus wasn’t going to swoop in and save the planet with super cosmic powers. He’d do it by getting hammered to a cross. His coronation was a crucifixion. His victory looked just like defeat. Hailed by John the Baptist as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” Jesus went out looking more like a black sheep, his sacrifice now suspect.

Maybe Mark should have just left Jesus dead and buried and spared everybody the disappointment. That way the women could have come by, brought their spices and paid their respects. His failure as a King could have been chalked up to overzealousness, and he could have still been memorialized as a wise sage for some of the things that he said: sayings like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Everybody likes that one. Leave Jesus dead and buried, and those ridiculous lines about loving your enemies or selling possessions could be ignored as anomalies; eccentric utterances of a man out of touch with the times. “Do not worry,” Jesus said. But that’s just silly. And seriously, who’s ever heard of losing your life to find it or plucking out your eye if it causes you to sin? Ignore-ignore. The same with praying for your persecutors and forgiving without limit. Leave Jesus buried in the ground and you could leave all that crazy talk buried with him.

Except this is the thing about Easter. Jesus doesn’t stay buried. Those women showed up at the graveside and BOOM! The stone was gone and the angel announced that Jesus was gone too. He. Was. Raised. From The Dead.

What are the odds of that? Better than the odds of winning Mega Millions? I do know that with lottery odds at 176M to 1, you not only have a better chance of getting struck by lightening, but based on U.S. averages, you’re about 8,000 times more likely to be murdered, and about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash. How’s that for adding some fear to your Easter? Toss in cancer and heart disease and every other reason people perish, and it’s a safe bet to say you’re 176M times more likely to die than you are to hit the lucky numbers. Death carries even odds.

Except this is the thing about Easter. Because of Jesus, rising from the dead also comes in at even odds. Because of Jesus, when your number is up, so are you. Up. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said. “Believe in me and even though you die, you will rise up to new life.”

Just like Jesus himself. The resurrection is Christ’s validation, his vindication, the proof that all his talk was true. Throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus got hammered by the religious establishment for talking blasphemy. He got hammered by the crowds for talking austerity. He got hammered by his fans for talking humility. He got hammered by his family for talking crazy. He got hammered by his own disciples for talking about becoming a casualty. And he got literally hammered by the Romans to beam of wood. What kind of Messiah does that? What kind of Messiah ends up dead? The kind of Messiah who knows he’s going to rise up from the dead. As the Easter Scriptures sing it: “Where O death is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

It is possible that there’s more to Mark’s gospel than what we have; but maybe Mark meant to stop here. Rather than tying up all the loose ends, Mark leaves room for you and me to come to the graveyard. To the rolled back stone. Face to face with the power of Easter. What do you do when you see an angel? When lightening strikes? When the lid blows off? When your number’s up? Because of Jesus, you don’t have to be afraid anymore. He has been raised and so will we. Take the fear of death off the table, and every other fear comes off with it. You can love your enemies now because you’re not afraid of them anymore. What can they do to you? You might as well forgive them, just like Jesus said. And why not let go of some of your possessions and give the money away? With resurrection in the bank, what more do you need? And what’s there to worry about either? You might as well stop that too. OK, so plucking out your eye remains a dicey proposition, but with the resurrection, sin loses a lot of its allure. And as for losing your life to find it? With the resurrection, that makes total sense.

Mark tells us the women “said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” He tells us they that “terror and amazement seized them” too. For “amazement” Mark uses the Greek word “ecstatic.” Just like winning the lottery. Except that with Easter, life always changes for the better. Like winning the lottery, the women were too afraid to talk. But they eventually did. They eventually went and told everybody. That’s why we’re here. The Lord is risen indeed.

Mark 11:1-25

by Daniel Harrell

The last thing anyone needs in church on a Sunday devoted to happy hosanna singing is a grumpy Jesus. What’s the matter anyway? It’s starts off well—he makes his grand entrance into Jerusalem, riding in all Messiah-like—although a stallion would probably have been preferable to a sequestered colt. He waves to the adoring crowds who throw off their coats and wave their palm-palms. It’s all good until for no good reason Jesus lets a helpless fig tree have it, followed by a withering tantrum in the Temple where he impetuously overturns tables and the chairs of those who work there. And don’t get me started about his promises about prayer. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” he says. “Tell this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.” Are you kidding me? Whatever you ask just believe and you’ll get it? We call this the “name it and claim it” way to pray. I don’t think Dawn covered it in her prayer class. It doesn’t work out so well in real life.

As we saw last Sunday, Jesus had grown immensely popular by this point in Mark’s gospel—so much so that the religious authorities wanted him dead. They wanted him dead for acting like God Almighty and for threatening their domination of the religion market. But they had to find a stealthy way to get rid him so as not to incite a mass riot. For the most part, Jesus resisted his fans’ clamor for him to let them treat him like a king. But it seems he finally gave in. Of course these same fans who waved palms start throwing stones once their king goes kong in the Temple courts. Wrecking the Temple was like spray-painting graffiti on the Sistine Chapel. Why would a good guy like Jesus do that? Unless he’s not really a good guy. By Friday all those Hosannas will give way to a call for blood.

Normally we interpret Jesus’ Temple tirade as an indictment against the commercialization of faith and the love of money as the root of all evil. But if you’ll remember from a couple of weeks back, buying and selling were actually necessary parts of proper Temple business. The Jerusalem Temple was where animal sacrifices happened, over and over, hundreds of times a day for all kinds of purposes, from atoning for sin to expressing deep gratitude. The Temple system was how you managed a right relationship with the holy God. And it had to be done right. In accordance with Torah, a right relationship with God cost you the best of your herds, flocks and crops—flawless livestock with no spot or blemish. However getting a bull or goat all the way to Jerusalem without dinging it up was a hard thing to do in those days. Therefore as a service to the faithful, the religious authorities arranged it so you could buy a blemish-free bull or goat at the door. You’d bring your cash, change it into Temple currency, buy your sacrificial lamb and present it to the priest. It was all very kosher. So what was Jesus’ problem with it?

To understand, Mark employs a literary device we saw him use last Sunday: the Mark Sandwich. Throughout his gospel, Mark sandwiches one story of Jesus inside another so to amplify the meaning of each. In this chapter, Jesus’ Temple clearing is sandwiched by two slices of fig tree cursing. Top Slice: a hungry Jesus looking for some breakfast. Finding a fig tree in leaf, he also found that it had no fruit—sort of like getting to Dunn Brothers only to find that they’ve run out of coffee. Understandably, Jesus got irritated. Humans do that when they’re hungry. Except that Jesus was no mere mortal. He could pray a mountain into the sea, so why not pray a few Newtons to pop out on a fig branch? He comes off as petty and petulant, picking off a helpless plant just because it had nothing to pick. To make matters worse, Mark notes that it wasn’t even fig season. Jesus was clearly barking at the wrong tree—like yelling at your refrigerator when you forgot to buy the milk. Except that what Jesus did was not about the tree but about what the tree represented. That’s right, the fig tree is fig-urative. Jesus provides a parable here, only this time he acts it out for the disciples to see (since they never could understand the parables he simply told).

Throughout the Bible, God’s people are compared to fruit trees, expected to flower and bloom and produce a crop that accords with their godly nature. Yet God’s people resisted their nature, treating grace as permission to do as they pleased. The prophet Jeremiah had stood in the same Temple courts centuries prior to convey the Lord’s displeasure. “You have no shame,” he howled, “you do not even know how to blush. When I would gather you, declares the LORD, there would be no grapes on your vine, nor figs on your fig tree; even your leaves are withered…” Their sin ran deep. They cheated and stole, they murdered and committed adultery, they lied and chased after shiny idols on weekends instead of worshipping God. But the topper was the way they used the Temple system to cover their backside; they’d sin and sacrifice and sin and sacrifice, only to go out and sin some more. Jeremiah yelled, “Will you steal and murder and cheat and lie and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are saved!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”

Jesus yells out this last line in his own Temple tirade, intentionally reenacting Jeremiah. If you read “den of robbers” as “hideout for evil,” then you get how it was that people treated the Temple as a safe-house for their sin. No wonder Jesus got so furious. By turning the tables he jammed the Temple trafficking and effectively brought a halt to the whole sacrificial charade. By blocking their access to God he threw a wrench into the whole relationship. Also citing Isaiah, Jesus cried out how the Temple was supposed to be a “house of prayer for all the nations.” The idea from day it opened its doors was that outsiders would always be welcome inside. The Lord is the Lord of all nations. God chose Israel, but as an example of his grace, not as sole beneficiaries. It all went to their heads, so that by the time we get to Jeremiah, the Temple had become some exclusive country club. Rather than putting out the welcome mat for their unbelieving neighbors, God’s people treated the Temple as a sanctuary from their unbelieving neighbors. Refusing to let his house to be so mistreated, God let it be leveled by the very pagan neighbors his people tried to keep out. And though the Temple was eventually rebuilt, the behavior never changed. Which was why Jesus pulled a Jeremiah.

Inasmuch as Israel’s story is our story too, we should presume the same sort of divine disdain whenever we treat church as a safe-haven to protect us from the secular world. We should presume the same sort of divine disdain whenever we take our relationship with God for granted, whenever we treat grace as insurance against our own bad behavior and bad choices. Grace is a free gift and there’s nothing you can do to earn it, but you still must do something to show you’ve received it. “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ,” Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth. “You can tell a tree by its fruit…” Jesus said, “and every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

Bottom Slice: Jesus and his disciples came upon that fig-less tree again, and Peter said, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed is toast.” It tasted a lot like Jeremiah too. “While you were doing your sinful deeds,” declared the Lord through the prophet, “I spoke to you again and again, but you did not listen. I called you, but you did not answer. Therefore I will now do to the house that bears my Name, to this temple you trust in, to this place I gave to you and your ancestors, I will [destroy it and] thrust you from my presence.” The fig-less tree was cut down before. It would be cut down again. This is the moral of the parable—except that Jesus’ response to Peter seems oddly off track. “Have faith in God,” he replies, “and you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea’ and it will be done for him.” In other words, shriveling a fig tree is nothing. Believe without doubting and you can transform the entire horizon.

OK, so maybe moving mountains is a bit of hyperbole. But I bet none of you can even muster enough faith to wither a houseplant unless you stop watering it too. This is the problem with prayer. It doesn’t really work the way Jesus says it does. Who ever gets whatever they ask for every time? Mountains remain where they’ve always been, diseases go uncured, marriages unrepaired, kids unruly and jobs unavailable. Nobody has enough faith. But even if we did have the faith to move mountains, that’s no guarantee that they’d go anywhere. The strong link between prayer and faith is not the link we think. Jesus is not talking about the amount of faith here, but the direction in which it’s pointed. Have faith in God, Jesus said, and you’ll get whatever you ask in prayer because of the way you will pray. Prayers pointed at God sound like the prayer prayed by Jesus: “Not my will, but Thy will be done,” as impossible as that can be sometimes to pray. Prayer is not about getting God to do what you want as much as it is getting you to do what God wants.

But why this digression on prayer anyway? Because Jesus was standing in what was supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations. But now that it had been reduced to a robbers’ den, God would leave it to suffer the apocalyptic ruin Jesus portended in chapter 13: not one stone would be left upon another. Note that Jesus did not say faith in God can move any mountain, but specifically this mountain, which for the disciples hearing Jesus say it in the shadow of the withered fig tree would have been the Temple mountain. Jesus was still on his jeremiad. “If you tell this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.” Because it’s going to happen anyway. About 40 years after Jesus said it, Rome would level the Temple as flat as the Babylonians leveled it some 600 years prior. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Taking for granted that the disciples were able to put tree and Temple together (which I know may be a reach given Mark’s portrayal of the disciples), I doubt their takeaway was that they too could wilt plants and move mountains, but I bet they did think they could turn the tables on their own enemies. It’s no secret that the religious authorities were gunning for Jesus’ followers too. Why take out a tree when you can take down a Pharisee, obliterate your obnoxious neighbor, your conniving ex-wife or the boss who just laid you off? Knowing how human hurt craves such vengeance, and concerned perhaps that his own volatile actions would be perceived as condoning vigilante violence, Jesus quickly added a caveat: “Whenever you pray, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”

For a guy in such a bad mood, this was a remarkable concession. He angrily kills a tree to forebode the end of relationship between God and sinners, then prays to throw the whole mountain of mess into the sea, only to turn around and extend grace? It sounds so strange until you remember that whenever Jesus spoke of the Temple he also spoke of himself. Both were the dwelling places for God. And both would be destroyed. The curse Jesus hung on the tree and the Temple was finally the curse he hung upon himself. The end Jesus forebodes he fulfills. As Isaiah foretold, “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” God wants grace for us so much that it kills him. Jesus became for us the perfect sacrifice for all time and for all people—the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Mark 14:3-11

by Daniel Harrell

Last Sunday’s foray into end times predictions always comes off sounding a little bizarre. Jesus foretells how “the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” The imagery comes out of Isaiah, apocalyptic pictures the Bible rolls out whenever it’s trying especially to get your attention. As such, you can imagine how terrifying solar eclipses must have been to the ancients. And how immensely grateful they had to have felt afterwards once God showed his mercy by letting the sun shine again. While Isaiah could have never known the physics, the fact is that the sun will go dark one day. Though nobody will be alive to witness it. Anybody in the vicinity will have already gone dark themselves. Here’s a view of a dying star going dark in our own galaxy, 3,800 light years away, taken from the Hubble space telescope. It’s called the Butterfly Nebula, a star that was originally about 5 times the mass of our sun. This is what eventually happens to every star. What looks like dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees, tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour. That’s fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes. Talk about shaking the heavens, when this happens to our own sun one day, it will effectively wipe out the whole solar system.

I spent this past week in New York at one of my faith and science gatherings, attended as usual by some of the most brilliant theologians and scientists in the solar system, including astronomer Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, the Senior Researcher for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope program. (She will be with us this coming fall for a weekend sponsored by Colonial’s Guelich Lecture Series—watch for details on that.) This past week’s conference premised how God displays his nature through both nature and scripture. As the Psalmist sings, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth shows forth his handiwork.” To have faith is to understand this. You look up into the night sky and marvel at the majesty of the Lord. Without faith, however, a heavenward gaze only leads to despair. As Richard Dawkins famously put it, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” The late astronomer Carl Sagan added, “We live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”

Astronomers conclude that the universe has been around for some 13.7 billion years; an amount of time that is truly incomprehensible. If you were to somehow condense it down to a single year with the Big Bang kicking off January 1, the earth doesn’t even show up until September 1. It takes eleven billion years to get from “in the beginning” in Genesis 1:1 to “earth.” Single cell life on earth shows up around September 15, followed by multi-cellular organisms bumping around for the next month or so. You’ve got a burst of organisms on the scene after that, with the dinosaurs coming and going around Christmas. Mammals start to expand shortly thereafter (once there aren’t any dinosaurs to eat them), with humans popping up so late on New Year’s Eve that there’s barely enough time to pucker up for a kiss. In evolutionary terms, your own life on earth isn’t even the neural impulse that leads to the blink of an eye. Christians believe people to be made in the image of the Creator himself, but science makes us out to be more of an afterthought if we’re even a thought at all.

The Psalmist rightly asks of God “what are human beings that you are mindful of us, mere mortals that you would care for us?” And yet, Jesus insists that “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to save it,” an absurd notion unless you recognize that this is precisely the way God has always worked. Not only did God create the heavens and pick an obscure blip of a planet to populate with people, he went on to pick the most obscure bunch of people with whom to have a relationship, a people for whom he eventually showed in person, as an indiscriminate carpenter in a backwater village in a backward time in history, who ends up rejected, unjustly convicted and executed on a cross. The Bible calls this “good news,” the demonstration of God’s love for the world, from the Lord of the Cosmos whom the apostle Paul describes as “pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

The magnitude of such things is truly incomprehensible, even if we do believe it. In this morning’s passage from Mark’s gospel, a woman crashes a party and pours an entire bottle of expensive perfume on Jesus’ head. Jesus recognizes it to be an expression of love that mirrors God’s own. He says, “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

The occasion was dinner at the home of Simon the Leper—which has to mean former Leper since no one except Jesus would have risked entering a leper’s house to eat. Jesus made time for sinners and outcasts of every stripe, basically breaking with every religious convention of his day. He may have had a mouthful of food when this woman entered to empty her jar. Back then, like now, perfume was used for enjoyment and beauty as well as for expressions of love. Unlike now, dinner hosts back then would customarily perfume the heads of their guests as they walked in the door as a sign of welcome and honor—much like we take our guests’ coats and offer them something to drink when they enter. But our offer would be for a glass of wine, perhaps, not for the entire bottle. Likewise, first century hosts would dab just a bit of perfume, nor pour out a whole jar, and definitely not a whole jar of the best stuff. One whiff and everyone knew what the woman brought was not a brand she’d bought by the quart. Mark describes it as being made of pure nard, an exotic root native to India. And it was expensive—think Vol de Nuit by Guerlain, which in New York will run you about $327 an ounce. Hers was an extravagant expression of love.

But as with all things extravagant—a word which means to lack restraint or unnecessarily exceed—the reaction to it was instinctively critical. Bring your wife back a small sampler of Parisian chocolate from New York that cost close to a hundred dollars, and her reflex response will be, “you should not have done that,” even though she’s glad you did. Of course you may be wondering if you’re paying your minister too much if he can afford a hundred dollar box of chocolates. Mark tells us how the guests at Simon’s table “said to one another in anger, ‘Why was this perfume wasted like that? It could have been sold for a fortune and the money given to starving children!” They scolded the woman, but Jesus understood their scorn to be aimed at him. He told them to leave her alone, because “she has done a good service, a beautiful thing for me.” And as to their rationale, he added, “The poor you always have with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish.”

Ironically, this saying is often offered as rationale for not helping the poor. We take it to mean that Jesus labels poverty a lost cause: “Hey, the Bible says ‘you’ll always have the poor with you;’ what can you do?” Actually Jesus alludes to Deuteronomy 15 here, where God commands his people to always take care of the needy anyway. His is not a remark of resignation, but rather a bit of rebuke: “You will always have the poor with you. You can help them whenever you want.” In other words, if you really wanted to help the poor, you’d be doing it already.

But this wasn’t about helping the poor. It was about saving face. Mark doesn’t say, but if Simon the Leper was a leper Jesus healed, why didn’t Simon pour perfume on Jesus? Why didn’t he show some love? It’s the least a good dinner host would have done for an honored guest even if he hadn’t cured him of a skin condition that banned him from polite society. In Luke’s gospel, Simon is a Pharisee and the woman was one who had “lived a sinful life.” Simon the Pharisee wonders to himself why Jesus can’t smell a sinner when he sees one. If Mark and Luke are describing the same scene, you may be wondering how a leper could ever become a Pharisee. But then again, the church is chock full of sinners saved by grace who grow to act like they don’t need grace anymore. And of course once you stop needing grace, it’s not long before you stop giving it too.

In Luke, Jesus went on to tell a parable about a certain creditor who had two debtors; one owed the creditor five hundred dollars, and the other fifty. When neither could pay, he canceled the debts of both. Jesus asked Simon the Pharisee which debtor would love the creditor more. And Simon rightly replied the one who had the bigger debt canceled. Jesus then proceeded to forgive the woman, much to the continued consternation of the Pharisees present. Nobody forgives sins but God alone. Who did Jesus think he was?

Unlike Luke, Mark makes no mention of this woman being a sinner in any special sense. She’s just a party crasher and a bottle breaker. A fragrance counter sales rep gone wild. The costly and posh perfume runs down Jesus’ hair, over his shoulders, and drips off of his sleeves. A whole year’s salary worth in a puddle on the floor. Who does that? Why spend all that money on something that’s just going to get washed off once Jesus takes a shower? Why give your wife ridiculously expensive chocolate that she’ll savor for a second and then digest the same way she would a handful of M&Ms?

There was a book out a few years back entitled Scroogenomics, by Wharton Business School economist Joel Waldfogel. In it he argued what so many of us instinctively feel: expensive gifts are wasteful. He rolled out the stats to prove it. Even in a down economy, Americans give somewhere between 60-90 billion dollars in gifts during Christmas alone, despite that according to surveys, most people value gifts at about 50 cents on the dollar. That’s a lot of waste. Half of those surveyed even admitted to re-gifting the fancier presents they received. But simply running the numbers on gift-giving discounts other intrinsic values. Not only is gift-giving a way of expressing how you feel for somebody, receiving a gift can be a reliable way of determining who the people are in your life who truly understand you. Had I brought my wife a hundred dollar box of cigars, for example, she would have wondered what I thought of her since she doesn’t smoke cigars that often. Moreover, a hundred dollar box of cigars isn’t what you’d ever call extravagant. I learned that to my own embarrassment after Violet was born.

If receiving a gift is a reliable way of determining who truly understands you, then the woman here in Mark understood Jesus even better than she realized. “She has performed a good service for me. She has done what she could”—by which Jesus meant she did everything she could. And note he doesn’t say, “you shouldn’t have.” He accepts her extravagant gift as a proper display of extravagant worship. He knows who he is. But he also knows where he’s headed. “The poor you will always have with you… but you will not always have me.” “She has anointed my body for my burial.” OK, so that’s kinda morbid. “Thank you for the chocolates honey, I’ll enjoy them as I die?”

Jesus’ mention of his burial is sandwiched like stories often are in Mark, one inside another in order to amplify the meaning of each. Here the top slice of the sandwich is verses 1 and 2. The chief priests and scribes are gunning for Jesus—something they’ve been doing since chapter 3. They wanted him dead for acting like God Almighty and because his popularity threatened their dominance of the religious market. They looked for a stealthy way to arrest Jesus because he was too popular to pick up in public without inciting a riot. Their desire for secrecy finds opportunity with the bottom slice of the sandwich. In verse 10, one of Jesus’ friends and disciples, Judas Iscariot, steps up with his offer of betrayal. He’d lead the religious authorities backstage away from the crush of Jesus’ fans. The priests and Pharisees couldn’t believe their luck. They probably even thanked God for it. They definitely thanked Judas by offering him a finder’s fee, albeit one that amounted to the going rate you’d pay somebody to walk your dog.

The bounteous meat between these two pieces of envy and penny-pitching deceit is the woman’s lavish devotion. Jesus receives her extravagant gift as good and beautiful, but also as timely. Perfume was used to express love and honor to the living, but also to express respect for the deceased. Jesus would be put to death as an outlaw, and therefore be denied the grace of a fitting burial. But Mark makes sure we see that Jesus did not sustain the disgrace his opponents later assumed he had. Though executed as a criminal; the woman provides his proper funeral. This is why “wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world,” her act would be remembered for what it was: an expression of extravagant waste, vindicating Jesus as Lord and Savior, the one who extravagantly wasted himself on us, for us, because he loved us.

The word to waste comes from a Latin root meaning to empty out. The same Latin root also gives us the word vast, meaning enormous or great. Thus to make empty is to make vast, which does sound a lot like the last going first and the least being the greatest in the Kingdom of God. However the Greek word translated as waste in Mark is the word meaning ruin or ravage, which is harder to hear as anything sounding like the Kingdom of God.

Critics of Christianity look to science to show how the emergence of human life on earth demanded enormous ruin and ravage, billions of years of apparent waste and futility, species extermination and organism road kill. Not only was the massive dying off rampant, it’s mandatory too. The emergence of life depends on the death of prior life, millions of generations of mutational and reproductive failure. Moreover, the familiar struggle for survival reveals a process in which cruelty and suffering are standard fare. There has been so much dysfunction, so much excess and error, so much ruin and ravage in the evolutionary epic that to attribute it to any superior, intelligent and benevolent Being is practically an insult.

Jesus knew all about insults. They were heaped on him as he hung on the cross. And yet by faith we view this ancient instrument of ruin and ravage as the supreme expression extravagant, sacrificial love. In this light, we can see the entire creation as an expression of God’s sacrificial nature; a cross-shaped character permeating the whole universe. Billions of years and billions of galaxies and stars and moons, all extravagantly wasted on us, for us. From all that vastness materialized one miniscule scrap of planet inhabitable for human life: life that took millions of years to unfold through untold waste and sacrifice so that we mere mortals could emerge as image-bearers of God, redeemed into the likeness of Christ by his own wasteful death, and so extravagantly filled to overflowing with his Spirit, that finally reflecting our Creator, we might extravagantly waste ourselves to his glory for the cause of love.

Mark 13

by Daniel Harrell

We’re back in Mark this fourth Sunday of Lent, working our way to Easter, but with a passage that points more toward the Second Coming than the Resurrection. Not that it matters. Let’s admit it: both of these “orthodox” tenets of Christianity are pretty outlandish. Neither gets brought up much in serious conversation. Not much in serious sermons either. I remember a fellow being new to church and asking, “Am I really supposed to believe that one day Jesus will show up from heaven riding on clouds with trumpets blaring like the Bible says?” I replied how stranger things have been believed. “No they have not,” he cried. “That’s as weird as it gets!”

The weirdness of Christian belief (which we prefer to call the “mysteries of faith”) probably explains why so many church folk prefer to emphasize Christianity’s more reasonable aspects: living an ethical life, making beautiful music and art, doing justice and serving the poor, building healthy marriages and raising good kids. The trouble is that you don’t really need Jesus to do any of those things. As theologian Philip Clayton puts it: once our beliefs become merely metaphorical or poetic—or worse, when one finds oneself using language one no longer believes but vaguely feels that one ought to believe–-one begins to wonder about the reason for the church’s existence.

It’s Jesus’ fault. He taught so many wonderful things; why did he go and mess it up by telling us how he’ll fly back to earth some day with angels no less? Mark and Matthew both record him saying how he’ll gather the elect from the four winds. In Corinthians, Paul has everybody rising from the dead. In Thessalonians, we all meet Jesus in the air. And then of course there’s Revelation. Martin Luther tried his best to get that book taken out of the Bible. It can be a little embarrassing—even though everybody does seem to be into apocalyptic storytelling these days. Bestselling author Tom Perrotta poked fun at the popular Left Behind series in his most recent novel entitled The Leftovers. I assigned it to my seminary class to get a sense of how secular culture views Christian weirdness. Perrotta depicts millions of people of all ages, genders, and faiths or lack thereof suddenly disappearing all over the world, but the question of what caused their disappearance is never answered. Jesus never shows up. There’s a satirical take on an un-raptured minister who’s so angry about being a leftover that he starts up a hateful newsletter dedicated to digging up dirt on the suddenly departed in order to protect his own piety. Though why bother? A Last Day that seems strange with Jesus is downright ridiculous without him.

One of my students put it this way: “However one may scornfully reject the story of eschatological zealots and religious nuts, the question remains: what replaces faith to meaningfully account for the disappearance of loved ones and an absence of purpose? The author unwittingly seems to be providing the answer. It’s just a random, sad, meaningless world that the author pictures before our eyes.”

Of course having a self-righteous minister get left behind wouldn’t be outside the realm of Biblical possibility. You may remember that Mark 13 follows on the heels of Jesus condemning a bunch of righteous ministers who managed to hoodwink a destitute widow into giving her last two cents to the church. Jesus lets loose a scathing indictment against these Pharisees, fuming about how “they shamelessly devour widows’ houses, cheating them out of their property, and then pretend to be pious by making long prayers in public.” Alluding to the poor widow and her mite, Jesus not only condemns the ill-advised values that motivated her action and the people who conditioned her to do it, he condemns the entire Temple-based religious system, labeling it bankrupt and doomed to destruction. Here the disciples marvel at the magnificence of the Temple—which people’s offerings had gone to construct and maintain. But Jesus replies, “Yes, look at these great buildings. They will all be completely demolished. Not one stone will be left on top of another!”

Jesus’ terrifying talk of wars and earthquakes and famine was hardly the end of the world compared to the loss of Jerusalem’s Temple. For Jews of Jesus’ day, nothing could have been more terrifying that that. The Temple was the religious, political and cultural nexus of Judaism; the very locus of the good Lord’s presence on earth. As such, it was thought to be impervious. This was God’s house. How could the Temple be destroyed when the Lord was still in it.

This logic momentously amplifies what might otherwise have been considered a throwaway line in verse 1. Mark writes that Jesus “came out of the Temple.” The Lord had left the building. Within forty years, Rome would ransack Jerusalem and reduce the Temple to rubble. According to the ancient historian Josephus, a Roman siege prior to the rampage caused frantic citywide starvation—people ate their babies to survive. Factional fighting among God’s own people resulted in more casualties than the Romans inflicted once they invaded. The scene was utterly bloody and chaotic. It’s why Jesus told his followers to run for the hills.

Their signal to run was the “abomination that causes desolation,” a phrase from Daniel’s prophecy which Josephus took to be the desecration of the Temple by Jewish zealots. After a stunning upset over a Roman legion in Jerusalem—akin to Lehigh taking down Duke on Friday—these zealots presumed their victory as divine prerogative to treat the Temple as booty. They allowed criminal perpetrators of every stripe to roam free in its courts. They made a mockery of the high priest, acting as if they were the Almighty themselves. The eventual Roman backlash resulted in many Jews fleeing to the Temple presuming God would save them there—that he would never let his house be sacked by pagans. But the Temple wasn’t God’s house anymore. Jesus made that clear when he cleaned out the moneychangers—a story we’ll circle back to on Palm Sunday.

For now understand that Jesus’ cleansing the Temple wasn’t about the money. Buying and selling in the Temple was a kosher business. Since the animal sacrifices offered there had to be perfect animals; and since living any distance from Jerusalem made it tough to get your perfect animal to the Temple without dinging it up, the religious authorities arranged it so you could buy a blemish-free bull or bird at the door. Turning over the money changers’ tables turned over the whole the sacrificial system. But why? Why undo the very means of grace proscribed by the Torah? Because, Jesus said: “You have made my house a den of robbers.” If you read “den of robbers” as “hideout for evil,” then what you understand is how God’s people treated the Temple as a safe-house for their sin. They used the sacrificial system as merely a cover, treating grace as permission to do as they pleased. Asking forgiveness has always been easier than actual obedience.

The Temple never would be rebuilt. But it did get relocated. The stick and stone structure gave way to a flesh and blood embodiment of God’s presence: Jesus himself. Embodying the Temple, Jesus too was destroyed due to the sins of the people. But unlike the Temple, Jesus was raised and vindicated as the only Son of God and Savior, triumphant over sin and rebellion, over injustice and evil; victoriously seated at the Father’s side with his enemies serving as his footstool. Citing Daniel again, Jesus foretells his victory parade as a “coming in clouds with great power and glory.” In Daniel, the Son of Man is granted “authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” Jesus employs Daniel’s language to frame his own resurrection and ascension, which is how he’s able to say in verse 30: “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”  The disciples indeed witnessed Jesus risen and ascended—just as some of them saw the Temple decimated too.

If this was the end of the story, we could assign Mark 13 to history as already fulfilled. The problem is that as the disciples stood and gawked at Jesus ascending to heaven in the book of Acts, two angels appeared and promised that “this same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go.” “Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” is how the Nicene Creed puts it. And Christians still recite it—even if they can’t believe it. Who can? Who would want to? Jesus says, “Beware that no one leads you astray.” “Be alert, I have told you everything.” “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” Jesus warns of persecutions and troubles his disciples will endure for being disciples. “You will be handed over to authorities and flogged. Because of me you will be hauled before governors and kings.” Not even their own homes would be safe: “Brother will betray brother and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. Everyone will eventually hate you because of me.”

Everything that Jesus said would happen to the disciples of that generation did happen. And a lot of it happened to disciples of later generations. And it happens still to Christians in many parts of the world. Certainly there have been plenty of wars and rumors of war and earthquakes and famines like Jesus said. And given the current state of technology and travel, you can make a good case for “the good news being proclaimed to all nations.” It’s 80 degrees in Minnesota in March! You’d think that if Jesus was coming back, now would be as good a time as any. The apostle Paul was eager for it. So were the earliest Christians. Of course then so was radio evangelist Harold Camping who had a lot of people looking up last May and then again in October with his end times predictions. Jesus did say that God only knows the exact time and date. In the meantime, the best we can do is endure, like the grandmother of a Southern friend of mine did, with a little sign she hung over her bed that read, “Perhaps Today.” The point seems to be that every moment matters. Jesus says live your life like the servants of “a man gone on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come.” “The one who endures to the end will be saved.”

In 1937, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who conscientiously resisted the Nazi regime at the cost of his own life, wrote a little book entitled The Cost of Discipleship. In it, he attacked what he called “cheap grace,” which he labeled as that prevailing practice among Lutherans designed to keep people comfortable with their sins—not unlike the prevailing practice Jesus attacked in regard to the Temple. “Costly grace,” Bonhoeffer insisted, carried with it the obligation of obedience. He wrote, “It is only through actual obedience that a person can become liberated to believe.” Although Luther taught that faith is prior to obedience, Bonhoeffer insisted that the two are effectually simultaneous, “for faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it.” In the end, what you believe is not what you say you believe, what you believe is what you do.

The last time I preached from Mark 13, the World Trade Center in New York had just been reduced to rubble. That felt like the end of the world. The London Times ran a story about a young British man employed by a firm with offices among the upper stories of the World Trade Center. The young man was taking vacation back in the UK visiting his family because his father was terminally ill. As the time approached for the young man to return to the United States and to work, his sister pleaded with him to extend his stay as it was likely to be the last time he would see his father alive. So the young man called his boss early that fateful September morning to request a few extra days, easily understandable given the circumstances. However, his boss refused the request, adamantly demanding that he return to his job as scheduled. And as the boss insensitively laid out his reasons, the young man heard a scream and the explosion in the background. And then the phone went dead. There were no survivors from that NY office. The friend who showed me this article remarked how it’s hard to imagine someone’s last acts on earth being the denial of another a few last days with his terminally ill father.

“Beware,” Jesus said, “for you do not know when the time will come.” Every moment matters. So much of what Jesus laid out for his disciples here had been spoken already in Mark. Jesus had already mentioned his glorious return back in chapter 8 as he admonished his followers not to be ashamed of the gospel. He gave them a glimpse of his glory in chapter 9 with his transfiguration. The darkening sun and moon were stock Old Testament apocalyptic language. The abomination that causes desolation and the Son of Man coming in clouds came from Daniel, as did the elect written in the book and the description of unparalleled distress. Like the disciples, Daniel the prophet had asked of the Lord “what will the outcome of all of this be?” And the Lord replied, “Go your way Daniel, because the words are closed up and sealed until the end of time. Many will be purified, cleansed and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand.”

Therefore, Jesus says: “Let the reader understand!” The Bible does not yield up much by way of encyclopedic detail about the last day. Faith is called faith for a reason. Christ’s command to the church is for obedience, not calculation. You need not know the when or the where—only the who and what. It is God in Christ who will finish what he began at creation and redeemed at Easter. It is Jesus who pulls everything toward its glorious Omega.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in the resurrection and a new world. It is only when one submits to obedience that one can speak of grace, and only when one sees the anger and the wrath of God hanging like grim realities over the heads of one’s enemies that one can know something of what it means to love and forgive them.” A British prisoner described Bonhoeffer in his last days as one who “always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and a deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive.” The same prisoner wrote that when he was taken away to his execution, Bonhoeffer said, “This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.”

Mark 12:1-12

by Daniel Harrell

We’re walking through portions of Mark’s gospel most of this Lent—using Luther Seminary’s Narrative Lectionary. The exception is next Sunday when we welcome Dr. Karoline Lewis, Assistant Professor of Biblical Preaching from Luther Seminary, who will speak from the gospel of John, a specialty of hers. Ironic, I know. Not that John and Mark are opposed to each other. Both have Jesus marking out the hard, cross-shaped road of discipleship. As Dr. Lewis will read next week, Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” It’s the same thing Jesus says in Mark, though last Sunday Jesus couched losing your life in terms of losing your lifestyle. A rich man ran up and asked him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” To which Jesus answered, “Go, sell however much you own, give the money to the poor, and then come, follow me and you will have treasure in heaven.” As we all know, the rich man couldn’t do that, and neither can most of us.

Jesus disciples, however, had given up everything, and in turn Jesus promised not only that they would inherit eternal life in the hereafter, but they’d get a right rich life in the here and now too: a hundredfold return in houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children and fields—albeit with persecutions. How was this possible? I suggested last Sunday that Jesus meant the hundredfold return metaphorically: houses and fields were code words for contentment, and brothers and sisters were code words for community. In other words, we the church, the body of Christ, serve as each others’ hundredfold return on earth—as hard and as challenging as that can be. Being present to one another in the more difficult times of life, bearing each others’ burdens will cost us something—if not a loss of life, at least a loss of lifestyle and time.

Many of you loved that idea. And loved that sermon—one of you went so far as to call it the perfect sermon—which I’m not exactly sure what to do with, aside from saying thank you and praise the Lord. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut this morning—why mess with perfection?—except that the true measure of sermonic perfection is the effect any sermon has on our life as a congregation afterwards. As Jesus always said, “A tree is known by its fruit.” That’s why, at the risk of sounding cheeky, I should probably respond to sermon compliments with something along the lines, “it’s too soon to tell.”

This being the case, the closest thing to a perfect sermon I’ve ever witnessed was preached many years ago by David Fisher, the former Senior Minister of Colonial Church. I was sharing with some of you last weekend about how David preached his perfect sermon while we were both serving at Park Street Church in Boston back in the 90s. David was mid-sentence regarding the resurrection hope we have in Christ when an usher rushed up to the pulpit and urgently slipped him a note. One of our long-time members had just keeled over dead in his pew. David read the note, looked over and observed that, sure enough, the pew seat which this longtime member occupied every Sunday—and where he had been sitting when the sermon started—was now vacant. David paused to pray for the dead man and his family as doctors in the congregation assessed the situation. Not missing a beat, he then applied his point about our resurrection hope to this very moment. No sooner had he finished that point, than the longtime member who was dead, bless his soul, suddenly sat up, revived. Needless to say, David Fisher went home feeling pretty good about that sermon.

The good feelings lasted only until the medical exam came back reporting that the man had in fact only fainted. The usher had overreacted and felt utterly humiliated, so much so that he resigned his usher post and thought about leaving the church. We managed to talk him out of that, but just barely, the shame he felt was so strong. Most regarded his shame as another overreaction, a disproportionate response given the situation. We inhabit a culture in which shame is regularly minimized and considered toxic to our self-esteem. Best to let it go and move on. However for this usher, an Asian-American man, honor and shame meant everything.

I was reminded of this last week during the theology class I’m teaching at Bethel Seminary. Our guest was an Asian-American pastor, who remarked how so many Lenten observances in American churches, in focusing on the cross, focus mostly on the horrific physical pain Jesus endured. For modern Americans, the avoidance of pain is our utmost concern. We can even handle death as long as dying doesn’t have to hurt. It’s the physical suffering that we fear. For Asian cultures, however, shame is much worse than physical pain. As this pastor saw it, the true horror of the cross was the horror of public disgrace. To die on a cross was to hang naked and fully exposed, humiliated and unable to hide yourself,  dishonored for all the world to see and scorn. The was crucifixion’s intent: it was cruel and unusual. No wonder the disciples were always so offended whenever Jesus told them he would take up a cross. It was scandalous. In ancient cultures, pain and suffering were just common parts of everyday life. The avoidance of shame was their utmost concern.

And yet University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that shame, “our most primal emotion as humans,” ironically “tells the truth that certain goods are valuable and we have failed to live up to them.” She asserts that shame can serve as a “morally valuable emotion, playing a constructive role in development and social change” for both individuals and societies. Shame is “essential for protecting our relations with people and groups whom we love and upon whom we are dependent;” shame serves as a “guardian of our desire to be worthy people.” Nevertheless, allowing for the benefits of shame remains difficult, especially in church circles where shame is viewed as “religious guilt,” detrimental to one’s spiritual health. It’s hard to hear Jesus’ shameful death tell the truth about our own sinful condition. The injustice of Jesus’ crucifixion was intended to rouse shame on the parts of its perpetrators—not only the Romans and the Jewish authorities—but all whose sins made his death a necessity, including you and me. A proper response to Christ’s death on the cross is not sympathy for his suffering as much as our shame for having caused it—a proper shame that properly motivates us to become people worthy of it.

Proper shame tells the truth and inspires transformation throughout Scripture. This morning’s parable form Mark is a prime example, told against the religious authorities who eagerly conspired to have Jesus killed for what they considered to be his blasphemy and his threat to their way of life. The parable was a story they would have already known. It came straight from Isaiah chapter 5: “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard… he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.” The Jewish religious authorities would have known the vineyard to be a metaphor for Israel, bad fruit a metaphor for disobedience and the vineyard owner a metaphor for God. Jesus takes a few liberties with Isaiah’s imagery which Jesus being Jesus was at liberty to do. He shifted the focus off the bad fruit and onto the ones who grew it: a band of tenant farmers whom he introduced into the story

It was customary for prosperous absentee landowners to lease out land to tenants who would manage the vineyards, farm the land, turn a profit and then pay rent with a percentage of those profits. The absentee owner in this story happened to be very absent—off in some far country—so he sent a servant around at harvest time to collect the rent. The tenant farmers, for some inexplicable reason, decided they weren’t going to pay. So they grabbed the servant, beat him up and sent him away empty-handed. The owner sent another servant whom the tenants insulted then pelted with rocks. The owner sent still another servant and this one the tenant farmers murdered! It was ludicrous. Still, the vineyard owner kept sending servant after servant and the tenants kept beating and killing them all. The vineyard owner was either a sucker for sedition or unbelievably long-suffering.

Finally, all out of servants, the owner decided to send his only beloved son. (An obvious tip-off to those who’d been at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration and heard God refer to Jesus that way.) “Surely they’ll respect my son,” the owner reasoned, due to either some very odd logic or to his being incredibly naïve. What father in his right mind sends his child into a bad neighborhood where he knows they regularly brutalize and kill people? Having already gotten away with murder, the tenants say to each other, “This is the heir to the vineyard! Come on, let’s kill him too and the inheritance will be ours!” How did they figure that? They were renters, not relatives. What sort of idiots were these farmers? Their lease arrangement was customary and profitable. Were they trying to cover up the bad fruit their work had produced? When the son arrived, they killed him and tossed his body out of the vineyard without even the decency of a proper burial. Did they really think the owner was that far away? What would the vineyard owner do to them once he finally returned? Jesus answers this one: “The vineyard owner will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.” Then Mark adds in verse 12 how the religious rulers “knew Jesus had spoken this parable against them.” And yet they had no shame.

Jesus tried again. “Haven’t you read the Scriptures?” Of course they had. They’d devoted years to training and study, they had their Bibles down pat. They were Masters of Divinity. They knew Psalm 118:22, which Jesus quoted, by heart: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’.” The religious authorities had always considered this verse to be speaking about them, the true chosen people. They were the rejected stone whom God would make the cornerstone. That Jesus would apply this honor to himself infuriated them. In effect Jesus declared himself to the true vine, the obedient child of God, the tree who bore righteous fruit; the one who would be despised and rejected for doing so, for making the chosen people look bad, for shaming the religious leaders. Shame is a powerful thing. It can evoke transformation. But it can also provoke violence.

In his most recent and disturbing book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, eminent black theologian James Cone addresses the church’s complicity in the common practice of murdering African Americans as a means of social and political control after the demise of Reconstruction. Like ancient crucifixions, lynchings were torturous, public spectacles. And more often than not, they were carried out by “good Christian folk”—people of genuine faith, deluded into believing that a dedication to white supremacy was part and parcel of their Christian identity. It is no coincidence that most of the lynchings from the late 19th to mid-20th century occurred in the Bible Belt. Church­going lynchers were often murdering other churchgoing Christians who were of the same communion: Baptists killed Baptists and Methodists killed Methodists. It’s how Dr. Cone ties the lynching tree to the cross: each was an unjust atrocity perpetrated by chosen people against one of their own, or in the case of the cross, against the chosen one.

As tenants of the vineyard, Israel’s religious leaders committed a double atrocity: they not only unjustly executed God’s beloved Son—along with all the servant-prophets who had previewed his arrival—but they outrageously ventured to usurp what belonged to God for themselves. It’s easy to write off these religious leaders as power-hungry malcontents whose illusions of entitlement blinded them into seeing themselves as immune from reaping what they’d sown. And yet, while the gospels tend to group these leaders together as one insidious lot and label them Pharisees, there were those among them whose faith in God was genuine. There were Pharisees who devoutly studied their Torahs, who worshipped sincerely, who cared for people, aided the sick, thoughtfully preached, who diligently obeyed the law while they fervently awaited the coming Messiah. Yet surprisingly the gospels make no distinction between the faithful and the deceitful when it came to the crucifixion. The good Christian Pharisees were guilty too.

As were Jesus’ own disciples. Sure they had given up everything to follow Christ, but once it looked like they might actually have to lose their own lives and honor, they gave up Jesus. No wonder they were so scared when he rose from the dead. Luke has them mistaking Jesus for a ghost. John has them hiding out for fear of the religious authorities, but having heard that Jesus was loose from the grave, they were also afraid of what he might do to them. They were ashamed of how they had treated to the Lord who loved them so, especially Peter who denied Jesus three times. When it came time to stand by his Lord, he lied about ever knowing who Jesus was. Nevertheless, Jesus forgave Peter three times over and told him to go out and feed his sheep. Lead his people. Build his church. Change the world.

The stone that the builders rejected became the chief cornerstone. “This is the LORD’S doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” You probably know next verse of Psalm 118 by heart: “This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” The shame that provokes violence also evokes transformation. Grace does that. Black theologian James Cone concludes that the horrific acts of lynching in America became acts redeemed by time; ethical examples of unearned violence that cleared a pathway for racial reconciliation. The same shame that provoked violence evoked transformation. Cone ties it to the power of the cross. The shameful cross that violently crucified Jesus shamed the prodigal Peter, and shames us too, back into the everlasting arms of God and then out into the world to feed and serve as Christ. May the communion table that makes us mindful us of Christ’s death shame us for our part in it. And may that shame transform us by grace into a fruitful vineyard of God.

Mark 10:17-31

by Daniel Harrell

Among the recurrent problems for modern-day suburban Christians in America is figuring out what losing your life for Jesus’ sake looks like. For the earliest disciples, taking up a cross for Jesus left little to the imagination. In a time when Roman rule demanded worshipping the emperor or else, losing your life for Jesus meant losing your life. Going to church was hazardous to your health. However these days, with actual martyrdom in America nonexistent, losing your life is easy since you know it ain’t going to kill you. But what if by losing your life Jesus also meant losing your lifestyle?

This morning’s Scripture passage is one that most of us dread. A man runs up to Jesus and falls to his knees. He asks, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Many presume the man to be seeking some prescribed formula for salvation, an accomplishable to-do-list for getting into heaven. Clearly he’d just missed the verses just prior about how you gotta be a little kid to get in. But then again maybe not. The man did ask in terms of inheritance, indicating that he understood eternal life not to be something he could earn or purchase. Jesus characteristically responded by changing the subject. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” This may have been Jesus’ indirect admission of his own secret identity, but it also seems to emphasize that genuine “goodness” is very hard to attain. Jesus asked the man about the Ten Commandments, which the man insisted he had kept since his was kid. Loving the guy for his enthusiasm, Jesus nevertheless sucked all the air out of his balloon. “You still lack one thing. Go, sell however much you own, give the money to the poor, and then come, follow me and you will have treasure in heaven.”

Now at this point in the story, everything the man owned could have been a small amount. It’s not until afterwards that we learn the man was wealthy, and apparently it was his wealth that he worshipped. He sadly slinked away, illustrating Jesus’ assertion elsewhere that God and money don’t mix. Here the Lord remarks how hard it is for rich people to get into heaven—harder than it is to thread a needle with a camel. Believers have always been shocked by this. In the Middle Ages somebody tried to come up with this silly idea about a gate in Jerusalem called the Eye of the Needle that camels could squeeze through if they held their humps just right. But there’s no such gate. We’re talking actual camels and actual needles here. No can do. The disciples were shocked by this since for them wealth was a sign of God’s favor. The rich man kept all the commandments. That’s why he was rich. But now if Jesus is saying not even this pious rich guy can squeeze in, what chance did poor sinners have? Who the heck could be saved? Jesus assured them that God can do anything, but whether that meant saving the rich guy is anyone’s guess. We never hear from him again.

If you joined the congregation this past Ash Wednesday night, you heard me quote Jesus from Mark about how the Kingdom of God belongs to little children. Interpreters traditionally take this to mean that childlike qualities of simplicity, innocence and trust are those intended by Jesus. But these characteristics were likely foreign to most first century people. Simplicity, innocence and trust, while admirable, ran a distant second to a whole set of other childlike characteristics such as ignorance, frailty, immaturity and foolishness. To be compared to a child was to be called a baby. It was humiliating. Which was the point. Jesus said you have to humble yourself like a child and become a servant, which would be like, well, selling all of your possessions and giving the money to the poor.

It would be humiliating, especially since our value as people is established mostly in economic terms. Just like it was in Jesus’ day. This is why we pay so much money for ephemera such as fancy cars or watches or jewelry or Mount Blanc pens: symbols of prosperity that are desirable because they are expensive. People spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money.” Unfortunately these advantages are easily diminished by the whims of fashion, rendering one’s status quickly commonplace or passé, and leading Jesus to suggest investing your treasure in heaven instead where neither moth nor rust nor changing style can diminish it.

I probably shouldn’t let this moment pass without making a stewardship pitch—we are running behind on our budget. Not that giving toward the church budget is storing up treasure in heaven per se, but it is better than hoarding all your money for yourself. I should also add that personal prosperity is not a Biblical vice. Diligence at work, good stewardship, education and faithful relationships—these are all Christian virtues that can result in financial gain. Yet with financial gain always comes the expectation of financial generosity. “From everyone to whom much is given, much will be required,” Jesus said. The issue is never that God’s people sometimes prosper, but that in their prosperity they adopt the attitudes of their high socio-economic status and afterward ignore or even despise those still clinging to the social ladder’s lower rungs. This may have been the rich man’s problem.

It might help to understand what the Bible means by prosperity. The Proverbs speak of prosperity as the “reward of the righteous,” which is why, like the disciples, many tend to equate financial gain with divine favor. But the word actually denotes a kind of contentedness independent of one’s bank balance. In fact, the most prosperous people in the Bible are often the most monetarily impoverished. As the apostle Paul expressed it to the Philippians, “I have learned the secret of being content whatever the circumstances, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Christ who gives me strength.” Jesus’ invitation to the rich young man to sell whatever he had was not a call to poverty, but a call to genuine faith and radical trust in Christ.

The apostle Peter, worried, perhaps, that his own salvation was at stake (if not his reputation), pipes up to remind Jesus, “Look Lord, you know we have left everything to follow you!” Jesus assures Peter that “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, who will not receive a hundred times as much now—along with persecutions—and in the age to come, eternal life.” Puzzling to most people about Jesus’ promise here is not that persecutions get included as a return on our investment (we all know we would suffer more for our faith if ever we really behaved in line with we say we believe). No, what puzzles most people is the hundredfold return Jesus promises now. We understand “eternal life in the age to come,” pie-in-the-sky in the sweet by and by, but what’s with multiple homes and family and real estate here and now? Who ever gets that?

It’s kind of embarrassing. It makes Jesus sound a little bit like convicted swindler Bernie Madoff, the master of the 50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Either that or some health and wealth prosperity preacher who promises believers that God will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams if they give to their church and just believe they will receive back a hundred times over, citing Jesus’ own words as guarantee.

If you haven’t personally reaped the kind of return Jesus promised, it may be because you really haven’t given up anything to follow Jesus. (Did I mention we’re running behind on our church budget?) On the other hand, Peter and the rest of the disciples gave up everything, but nowhere do we ever see them raking it in. This reason is because Biblical prosperity is not about the money. There is a contentedness and a confidence that comes with faith in Christ that money cannot buy. Moreover, there is a community too. Jesus promises not only a hundredfold return in homes and land (code words for contentment—think “a house and a yard”), but a hundredfold return in brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers as well. Who are these people? Back in Mark chapter 3, Jesus was preaching to a packed house when his family rolled into town. Too crowded for them to get in the door, his mother and brothers got a message to Jesus indicating that they were looking for him. Jesus responded by asking, “Who is my mother?”—which must have made poor Mary faint right on the spot. And if that weren’t enough, Jesus then turned to the motley crew crowded around him—poor fishermen and prostitutes, despised tax-collecting losers and sinners of every stripe—and said “Behold my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God, that’s my brother and sister and mother.” So much for family first.

What’s Jesus saying? Look around. Go ahead, take a look. This is your hundredfold return. We are each other’s reward… Wow. It’s a little disappointing isn’t it? I bet the disciples felt the same thing. They took a look at each other and thought, “I left everything I had for this?” And that’s before tacking on the persecutions. How is this a reward? Ask most folks to describe Christians and the adjectives typically include words like hypocritical, self-righteous, judgmental, selfish and downright spiteful sometimes. There’s the running joke that churches would be great places if it weren’t for the people. If only we could have Christ without Christians.

Turns out that maybe you can. Here’s a little video to show you how….

This has got to be one of the silliest Christian ideas to come along in weeks. Answer a few questions, click a few buttons, and boom, Monvee designs a customized personal walk with the Lord based on the way God has wired you to walk. Persecutions not your thing? No problem, Monvee will map out a less painful path. Prefer to keep your possessions for yourself? OK, Monvee will steer you clear from those guilt-inducing commands in the Bible. Monvee’s designer described it as “the eHarmony for your soul, but instead of finding a mate, Monvee helps you know how you’re wired and how you best connect with God.” The best part is that Monvee lets you find G-Harmony all by yourself! No more hypocritical Christians. No more boring church sermons. No more messy small groups. No more needy people. Just a few clicks and you can relax your way to righteousness.

OK, so maybe I am a cynical old man who wouldn’t know a life-transforming technological advance if it hit him in his Palm Pilot—even if I do have the cool glasses. Maybe a programmed relationship with Jesus is better than having to wait and pray and trust and suffer and deal with all the ambiguity. Just the way Facebook and other social networks beat awkward or tedious interactions with people in person where you’d have to waste time listening to them go on and on about all of their problems or drive them to the airport or something.

Those of you familiar with psychological research are likely familiar with the famous Grant Study, a 72-year longitudinal look at a group of men at Harvard, alongside another group from inner-city Boston and a group of women from California. Typical psychology studies that examine people at single moments in life can be terribly misleading—a man at 20 who appears impossibly wounded may in fact be gestating toward amazing maturity. Longitudinal studies, though expensive and time-consuming, take in an entire life span and see how everything fits together. The goal of the Grant Study was to determine the key to “a successful life.” When asked recently what he learned from studying the lives of more than 300 people across seven decades, the project’s chief researcher, George Vaillant responded: “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Jesus was right again. Look around. We are each other’s reward.

And yet, Professor Vaillant tells the story of one “prize” subject, a well-known physician and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came one hundred single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. His wife put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Professor Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box of letters down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the physician said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read them.” To which Professor Vaillant concluded, “It is very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Maybe this helps explain our addiction to Facebook kinds of friends. They require little more than our coming up with clever status updates and hitting “like” now and then. The problem with actual love is not only what it demands you give it to needy people, but that love exposes you to be needy too. I remember a guy who worked with me on a homeless ministry project complaining about having to listen to needy people go on and on about their same problems over and over again. It was tedious. Hearing his complaint, an older member of our group interjected how that is the tough thing about friendship: being there to listen to friends talk about their same old problems. It can be tedious. Frustrating too. But the great thing about friendship is that there will be times in your life when things won’t be going so well for you. And when that day comes, you’ll have someone there to listen to you too.

“Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions.” What if Jesus’ words are not some hyperbolic declaration, but an actual invitation, or even a provocation to us to become each other’s hundredfold return? What if we were to be each other’s reward, each other’s brother or sister or mother or father or child? You would have hundreds. What if Jesus’ inclusion of persecution is also a further invitation, or even a provocation, to step into the harder, more difficult aspects of these relationships, sharing one another’s troubles in ways that cost us something—if not a loss of life, at least a loss of lifestyle or some loss of time? I think if we consistently made that kind of investment, it’d be hard for anybody to use adjectives such as hypocritical or selfish to describe Christians anymore. The only adjective that would fit, I think, would be: rich.

Jonah 4

by Daniel Harrell

Last Sunday was like one of those bad movie sequels, like Another 48 Hours, or The Next Karate Kid. You sat there and thought: haven’t I seen this already? The same plot? The same players? The same ending? How can this be happening—again? Somehow you hoped things might turn out differently this time. Its not often you get a second chance, such a textbook set-up for redemption. But there it was, only to be squashed by a furious rally. By a miraculous catch. By a mediocre effort at stopping the inevitable. It ends up like just you knew it would, but you still can’t believe it. It makes you so mad that you’re awake the rest of the night. That’s right, I’m talking about Jonah. (What did you think I was talking about?) God directly orders Israel’s prophet to the pagan city of Nineveh, the capital of enemy Assyria, to warn them of their looming doom. Jonah refuses—the only prophet ever to be so brazen—or so brainless. He tries to escape at sea, but God rallies in furious fashion, sending a vicious storm that forces Jonah to go three and out—of the boat. Then comes the miraculous catch—into the mouth of a fish—compelling Jonah to follow the game plan this time, which he does in defeated fashion. He has to deliberately let the other team score, and then bury his head on the sideline to await the final whistle.

Jonah’s story is one of unwelcome grace. The prophet wanted the Lord of Glory to bear his Old Testament teeth, to rise up in wrath against the odious Ninevites, the epitome of all evil. Drop the heavenly hammer, Sodom and Gomorrah style. Rain down some hellfire and brimstone. Plague and pestilence. But instead, way ahead of schedule, God showed his New Testament side and sent showers of blessing instead. He did as Jesus will describe him doing in the Sermon on the Mount, he “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous alike.” In response to Nineveh’s repentance, the Lord changed his mind and relented from meting out judgment. God’s anger was stopped; but Jonah was just getting warmed up.

The prophet is livid: “I knew you’d be gracious!” he yells as he prays. “I knew you’d be merciful! I knew you’d be slow to anger and abounding in love, that you’d forgive anybody who wants it and would change your mind about sending punishment!” As it turns out, the Old Testament God has a soft spot for contrite sinners too. Jonah labels Yahweh as “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, who relents from sending calamity,” but it’s not a characterization he comes up with all on his own. It’s the way the Lord is described in Exodus, in Nehemiah, in the Psalms and on the lips of the prophet Joel too. When extended to Jonah, God’s grace and mercy made him thankful. But when given to the Ninevites, it just made him mad. Their reputation was as a “a city of bloodshed, full of lies and never without victims.” So what that they repented? People repent all the time, and then after they get their forgiveness, they just go back to doing what they were going to do anyway. Who says that Nineveh won’t return to their murderous ways once they’ve been spared? How can God be so naïve? So soft? So unfair? So unjust? “You’re killing me Lord! Killing me! If your intent is to let evildoers off the hook, then you might as well just take my life and kill me now. It is better for me to die than to live.”

OK, so maybe Jonah is being a little melodramatic. Still, talking about loving your enemies does bring out the drama. Whenever I’m teaching the Sermon on the Mount, like I was doing this past Wednesday night, and get to that part about not retaliating against evildoers and all that turning the other cheek and going the extra mile ridiculousness, the knee-jerk reaction, like Jonah’s, is to immediately object and complain about God’s abdication of justice and about our having to be doormats for the Lord. We roll out the serial rapists and the pedophiles and the repeat drunk drivers and Hitler, and how since nobody could ever be expected to forgive them, how dare Jesus expect us to forgive your own enemies—you know, the rude co-workers, or the insulting neighbors, the customers who stiff you, or the relatives who still owe you money? Sure, Jesus only commands us to turn our heads a little, part with a shirt and walk a few thousand feet more, but why would you ever do that for somebody who’s being a jerk? Oh, and then knowing he’s already asking the impossible, Jesus loads on the guilt, telling us to “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” as if your own parents weren’t demanding enough.

As we sit there and stew in our self-justifying juices, God’s question to Jonah becomes his question to us: “Is it right for you to be angry?”

It’s a question that’s left to dangle as chapter 4 goes on to indulge in a bit of a flashback. You’ll remember from last Sunday how Jonah’s token obedience resulted in a short, single sentence sermon: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” The prophet didn’t mention God once. He said nothing about the possibility of grace or any need to repent or any invitation to reform, all on purpose. He skipped the closing hymn and gave no benediction, no hope for any salvation. And then as fast as he could, lest the Lord send some other beast to bite him, he got out of town, shaking the dust off his feet as he went. He secured a perch overlooking the city and set up a temporary shelter, a prime spot from which to view what was sure to be a brimstone blowout. But to everyone’s shock, the Ninevites took Jonah seriously. His sermon set off a stampede of shame and repentance with the entire city stripping down to sackcloth, wallowing in ashes and fasting from all food and drink. It was an unmistakable plea for mercy to a deity they did not even know. And so that their ashen appeal wouldn’t be mistaken as a piety show, they stopped doing their evil and turned from all the violence and injustice of which they were guilty. And they did all of this without any grace guarantee. Lamented their contrite king, “Who knows whether this God will change his mind and pull back his wrath so that we do not perish.”

This being a flashback, Jonah is not yet aware of the Ninevites’ overwhelming reaction to his sermon. He does not yet know that God has accepted their corporate apology, honored their change of behavior and canceled the fireworks. Due to Jonah’s temper, the Lord decides to break the news to him gently. He sends Jonah a houseplant. A fast-growing Jack-in-the-beanstalk that provides additional shade for Jonah’s vigil of vengeance. The plant puts Jonah in a very good mood—it’s the first time we’ve ever seen the prophet smile. But then the Lord sends in a weevil with explicit instructions to chew through the plant and wither Jonah’s leafy canopy. After that the Lord sends a burning hot wind and jacks up Jonah’s discomfort. God does unto the plant what Jonah wants done unto the Ninevites. How does the prophet like his theology now? “Is it right for you to be angry—about a houseplant?” asks the Lord, loading his question this time with a tangible illustration. The heat getting to him, Jonah is in no mood to learn anything. His melodrama reignites. “Yes I have a right to be angry!” he screams, “I’m angry enough to die!”

What Jonah needs is a good therapist. Some pastoral perspective. Let’s analyze it: He’s mad about a football game—I mean a houseplant. Here today and gone tomorrow. It’s not like it would have made a contribution to world peace or eliminating poverty or reducing climate change. It’s just a football game. I mean a college basketball game. I mean a houseplant! It has no impact on the health of my family, my job satisfaction, the happiness of my marriage, my relationship with my friends. So why do I care? Why do I lay awake night and obsess over the one or two plays that could have totally changed the outcome? Need I be so upset? So devastated? Must I bear my teams’ defeat like some indelible sports tattoos, rubbing my grief in my face and until I die? If I must care so much and be so distraught by something intended solely for my entertainment, something for which I did nothing but sit passively and watch on TV while eating buffalo wings and swilling beer, then why can’t God care about this great city with 120,000 actual living, breathing people locked in their sin and self-destruction who know not what they do nor how to be saved from it? And their animals too? “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus asked, “Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. And you are of more value than many sparrows.”

The conclusion to Jonah is often used as motivation for mission, specifically urban mission. Half the world now lives in cities, from culture shapers, next generations and immigrants to the poorest of the poor. Christians are called to care about cities like God cares about cities, which is what motivates Colonial Church to partner with city ministry organizations like Community Emergency Services, Families Moving Forward, Young Life and Calvary Baptist Church among others. There are close to 10,000 homeless children in Minneapolis, half of them under age six. 23% of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Perhaps this makes you mad. If so, get mad enough to do something about it. Compassion is a good way to channel your anger. Unfortunately for Jonah, compassion was what made him angry. God’s grace ticked him off.

Our Wednesday night study prayed for the family of Ann Blake this week, the mother of two middle school children who was struck and killed on a Maple Grove sidewalk as she waited to cross the street. She was hit by a car whose driver had a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit as well as an empty vodka bottle in her vehicle. Police were already tailing the driver at the time of the wreck, after receiving a report of erratic driving. Ann Blake’s twin children, one of whom is autistic, are orphans now. Their father died just four months prior, following a year long bout with cancer. Both parents were active in their Lutheran church and helped with Bible school and were advocates for children with autism. It’s unspeakably tragic. We shake our heads at the senselessness, and we shake our fists at heaven demanding to know why God keeps letting such horrible things happen. But what really enrages us is the fact that this drunk driver gets to go on living her life; that she may even find her way to some kind of redemption. And not only does God allow it, but he loves and cares for her too. And far worse than all that, God insists that I care. That I even go so far as to forgive her. That I “be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect.” Jesus! That is so infuriating!

Let’s analyze our anger just a little bit more. If ever you’ve found yourself in the same boat with Jonah—or in the same fish or under the same houseplant—ask yourself this: Are you mad because your faith cramps your lifestyle and places insufferable restraints on your true identity? Or are you mad because your Christian faith is your true identity, and what’s insufferable is your constant failure and refusal to live it out. In other words, are you mad because you feel repressed by being a good Christian, or because you feel frustrated for being a bad Christian? If my question still confuses you, try an experiment. In the next two weeks leading into Lent, take the first week and be as uninhibited and as shamefully abrasive as you dare to be within the law. Forget Jesus and the kingdom of God. Most of all, forget that other people have feelings. Just care about your feelings and then act on those feelings. Lean into your indignation. Be a savage.

Then take the second week and try as hard as you can to be as perfectly Christian as you know how to be. Show as much indifference to other people’s rudeness and insults and you showed for their feelings the week before. Don’t be pious, just live out the gospel in as bold and as loving a way as your imagination allows. Do what’s right and responsible and honoring to God with all the character, integrity, generosity and prayerful humility you can muster. Be a saint.

At the end of your two weeks, ask yourself the following: Which approach to life is the true you? The answer will probably be both.

Fury and faith are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. Herein lies the mystery of the cross. It is through the injustice and through the anger that compassion and grace finally come. If by anger we mean that unleashed, impassioned and savage hostility against those people and circumstances which violate, offend, frustrate, threaten, endanger or impede; then the cross of Jesus must be viewed as the anger of God in its truest expression. The sin Jesus bore—of which we all share guilt—brought down the full and just fury of heaven. Moreover, if by grace we mean that unleashed love and compassion for those people who do not deserve it and yet understand that they need it and are dead without it, then the cross of Jesus must be viewed as the grace of God in its truest expression too. God channels his righteous anger into compassion for sinners. He so loves the world that his gives his own Son to die and rise for it, forgiving a world that knows not what they do, making it so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish, but can permanently live a life of grace and compassion themselves. To be perfect like their Father in heaven who makes them perfect.

The family of Ann Blake released a statement upon learning about the drunk driver’s alcohol levels. “This information at least provides closure as to the cause. Nothing can bring Ann back or erase the pain that everyone who was close to her has felt for the last week,” it read. And then they added, “We believe in forgiveness and grieve for the driver and for her family just as we grieve for the loss of Ann.”

Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel observes how “God’s answer to Jonah, stressing the supremacy of compassion, upsets the possibility of looking for a rational coherence of God’s ways with the world. History would be more intelligible if God’s word were the last word, final and unambiguous like a dogma or an unconditional decree. It would be easier if God’s anger became effective automatically: once wickedness had reached its full measure, punishment would destroy it.

“Yet, beyond justice and anger,” indeed even through justice and anger, “lies the mystery of compassion;” the mystery of the cross.

Jonah 3

by Daniel Harrell

The closest I’ve ever come to wearing sackcloth was the last time the Patriots played the New York Football Giants in the Super Bowl. Overconfident in the undefeated Patriots’ ability to fend off all comers, I rashly wagered with a loudmouth Giants fan that New England would mercilessly mow down her boys in blue as with every other team they’d rolled over that season. Gathered among the faithful to witness what I believed to be the inevitable Super Bowl night, we were joined in disbelief at Eli Manning’s escape and David Tyree’s ridiculous helmet aided catch. Clearly the Lord’s hand was in it. Following the humiliating loss, I penitently paid my bet. I covered myself with a Giants hat and jersey—sackcloth and ashes for any Bostonian—walked the streets of Boston and loudly professed  my love for New York, much to the derision of my fellow New Englanders. On the one hand I deserved the disgrace on account my hubris and misplaced faith. But on the other hand, my display was a hopeful prayer for a second chance, an opportunity for redemption and maybe even revenge. Tonight is that second chance.

For the overconfident King of Nineveh here in Jonah, potentate of pagan Assyria, the Bill Belichick of the ancient Near East, the prediction of his nation’s pending upset to underdog Israel elicited immediate—remorse! The king “rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.” For this pagan king to offer such a shame-filled display in response to the words of an insufferable Hebrew prophet before the game had even been played was nothing short of remarkable—so remarkable that Jesus would commend its virtue centuries later as an indictment against Israel’s own arrogance. Not only did the Assyrian King repent, but all of Nineveh reformed their behavior, turned from their evil ways and from the violence and injustice of which they were guilty. And this without any guarantee of mercy. The king prayed to a deity he did not recognize—referring to God with the Hebrew generic elohim. “Who knows” said the king, “this God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

Of course for those who did know the Lord, who knew elohim to be Yahweh, the idea that he should ever change his mind was absurd. As the Reformer John Calvin would later assert, any suggestion that the Lord would change his mind or relent (or as the King James so boldly puts it, repent) would imply that “either the Lord is ignorant of what is going to happen, or cannot escape it, or hastily and rashly rushes into a decision.” The Bible unambiguously declares in Numbers 23 that “God is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act? Has he ever promised and not carried it through?” Likewise in 1 Samuel 15: “The Glory of Israel will not recant or repent; for he is not a human, that he should change his mind.” The problem, of course, is that God does repent and change his mind. He does it in Genesis where He repents of having made people. He does it in Exodus where he changes his mind about destroying the golden calf-loving Israelites. Likewise with the prophets Joel and Amos, God changes his mind about his plans for his people. Even in 1 Samuel 15 where the Lord says he doesn’t repents he repents over having made Saul the first king of Israel.

If such change of heart on the Lord’s part bothers you (and as we will see it clearly bothered Jonah), it may be because you project too much of your own manner onto God. We quickly think of all the times we change our own minds—times that usually have to do with poor decision-making skills, lack of information, fear, anxiety or sin—none of which characterize God. “God is not a human, that he should change his mind” should be understood as “God does not change his mind like we humans do.” Unlike humans, God does not say one thing and then do another, nor does he change his mind for frivolous reasons or for no reason at all. God is not capricious or arbitrary but consistent and reliable—and he never changes in regard to his dependability or character. As the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the Word Made Flesh in Christ and the Holy Spirit who dwells in his people, the Lord is reliably personal and consistently loving. He is eager for relationship and therefore always responsive.

Because God loves us, he responds to our repentance and relents from allowing us what our deeds deserve. He is patient with us, creating space for the experience of relationship on our part, for the awareness of our need and for the necessity of our humility and surrender to his mercy. The long-suffering nature of God makes possible a new beginning after every personal disaster and failure. “God is patient with you,” the apostle Peter wrote, “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

This is good news for sinners—not so good for those sinned against. This will be Jonah’s gripe. Nineveh was a nation devoted to violence and murder. The prophet Nahum labeled it “a city of bloodshed, full of lies and never without victims.” How can wearing sackcloth and ashes and promising to do better suffice for years of brutality? What if Syria’s current President Assad and his henchmen suddenly stopped killing their citizens and said they were sorry? Does everything revert back to normal as if nothing happened? What about the abusers in your own life? Saying “sorry” and promising not to do it again may be enough for God, but what about you? I remember a woman once narrating for me a horrific history of her own violation, sins she simply could not and would not forgive. If granting grace to her abuser was what it meant to follow the Lord, then she could not follow the Lord. True, God had forgiven her sins and shown her grace to be sure; but her sins unto others were in no way as heinous as what had been done unto her. “I need a God who gets even,” she said, “The angry and vengeful God is a God I can obey.”

That God was so merciful would be why Jonah found obedience so impossible. The Lord ordered the prophet to Nineveh to warn them their days were numbered—in effect to give them one more chance. But Jonah, the only prophet ever to disobey a direct order, ran away in the opposite direction. He boarded a boat headed for the other end of the earth, but he could not hide from God. The Lord furiously bombarded his boat with a ferocious storm. Recognizing his own days to be numbered now, Jonah gave up, but he didn’t give in. He went overboard, willing to drown rather than do as he was told. But God would not let Jonah off the hook so easily. Making him into whale bait, God had a great fish eat Jonah alive and then puke him up onto the beach. And when Jonah came to, God issued his order again: “Get up, go to Nineveh and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” It’s almost word for word with the command in chapter 1, except that here the main Hebrew verb “proclaim” carries a more positive tone, denoting a call to repentance and deliverance. God is going to give the Assyrians a break and Jonah simply can’t stand it.

And yet maybe because three days in the belly of a fish in the middle of the ocean was as bad as it sounds, Jonah complies, albeit with the smallest amount obedience he can get away with. He trudges into Nineveh and delivers a one sentence sermon. Five words in Hebrew that translate to eight in English: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Jonah doesn’t mention God once. Nevertheless, these minimal words were more than enough, causing a stampede of repentance—an altar call on steroids—which has presented a challenge to long-winded preachers ever since. Like the pagan sailors on Jonah’s boat, the pagan Ninevites were better at being chosen people than the chosen people. The Ninevites took Jonah more seriously than the God’s people would ever take Jeremiah or Joel or Amos or Jesus. When Jeremiah brought them bad news, they had him locked him up. When Jesus did the same, they him strung him up. It’s hard to see your enemies offered grace. Harder still is to have it offered to you. An offer of grace presumes that you need it.

Jonah preached during a politically prosperous time for ancient Israel. They were living the dream of favored-nation status—strong and rich—so much so that they grew complacent and started to gloat. They confused God’s glory for their own and hogged it all for themselves. Jonah breathed in this air of superiority, figuring with the rest of God’s people, that the favor of the Lord was what they deserved. The last thing he wanted was for the despicable Assyrians to have a seat at the same table. God knows they deserved nothing but ruin.

I’m teaching a class up at Bethel Seminary this quarter on the topic of Theology and American Culture. Of course, a better title for the class might be Theologies and American Cultures, given the reality of pluralism in our country. It wasn’t always like this. We hear politicians pine for a “Christian America,” a nostalgic time when, culturally speaking, faith in Jesus was practically inevitable. It was a time when everyone affirmed the same religious values, spoke the same religious language, understood all the religious symbols and had their religious beliefs buttressed by social practices and mores woven into everyday life. Sure there were other cultures around, but they all just melted into the pot. These days, what with the expansive growth of cities and urbanization, with stunning advances in travel and technology bringing with it exposure to so many different cultures and ideas, religious belief is no longer the status quo. The Melting Pot has become more of a Super Bowl Party Buffet, a pluralistic smorgasbord of distinctive flavors and tastes. The buffalo wings share top billing with the guacamole and the fried mozzarella. There’s not really a main dish anymore.

By 2050, America will be a country with no ethnic majority. As we discussed the implications of this in my seminary class, it was clear that Christianity would be changing too. We had Korean-American Professor Soong-Chan Rah as our guest in class this week—speaking to us via Skype from Chicago on his Smartphone (talk about stunning technological advances). He noted how when current majority-culture Christians describe theological perspectives different from their own, they’ll use labels such as Asian theology or black theology or liberation theology. But when speaking of their own theology they just say theology—this despite the phenomenal growth of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, numeric growth that has already lapped Christianity in the West. He called this labeling the bitter fruit of the church’s “western white cultural captivity.” He said it’s the cause of the American church being so individualistic and so commercially materialistic and so morally accommodating to popular culture. Professor Rah then went on to ask why in a day when white Christians jump into the political fray over all sorts of issues with little Biblical precedent, we remain comparably hesitant when it comes to caring for immigrants and aliens, which the Bible promotes over and over again. Professor Rah proposed that the reason for the silence on immigration from white churches is because white people are afraid of a nonwhite America and a nonwhite Christianity.

Naturally I and my class of snow white Minnesotans were duly offended. Were we being called racists? At a seminary? As budding young pastors and prophets for the Lord? And yet even being a prophet of God was no guarantee against fear and disgust toward those unlike himself. Jonah hated the Assyrians. The last thing he wanted was for them to show up in his country or at his church or at his table. So what they wear burlap and say the right words, so what that they turn from their evil—who’s to say that once they’ve been spared they don’t go back to their vicious ways? They were that kind of people.

And they were. Within 50 years, the Assyrians would rise up and run over Israel, leveling the Northern Kingdom and carrying its citizenry into exile. And the Lord’s hand was in it. Israel’s complacency and conceit were sins in his sight. God sent Amos and Hosea and told them to knock it off, but they didn’t. And so the Lord announced he would “spare his people no longer.” The repentant Assyrians became the Lord’s ironic instrument of judgment against his unrepentant chosen people. When it comes to his justice, God shows no partiality.

And yet, because God is reliably personal and consistently loving; eager for relationship and therefore always responsive, his anger can be interrupted, halted or completely turned aside. God can change his mind. His love knows no limits—except the limit on those who would despise his love. In their case, divine patience will take the form of waiting for that Day for which evildoers will have piled up their wicked deeds. In an analogous passage from Joel that gets read every Ash Wednesday, the Lord speaks from the verge of his destructive justice and declares that “The day of the LORD is great; it is dreadful. No one can endure it.” “But even now,” declares the LORD, even then with one last gasp, “return to me with all your heart… Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.”

Because God loves us, he responds to our repentance and relents from allowing us what our deeds deserve. He changes his mind. However strictly speaking, even sinners who repent still deserve to be punished. The God who loves cannot abdicate justice. Everything does not revert back to normal as if nothing happened. God’s righteous anger against sin and injustice remains in force, even in the face of forgiveness. It’s what makes grace so scandalous. God’s righteous anger is enforced, only not against the ones who deserve it. Instead, God absorbs his justice onto himself—onto the body and blood of Christ shed for us. And because God loves us, there’s no changing his mind about that.

Jonah 2

by Daniel Harrell

I was late for last Sunday’s pot luck meeting due to the football game. My years in Boston made me a diehard New England Patriots fan (this despite Bill Belichick’s reputation as the Darth Vader of football). I had planned to set my DVR for the game, but the lure of live TV got the best of me. As most of you know by now, the Baltimore Ravens drove the length of the field in the final minute only to have their Pro Bowl placekicker, Billy Cundiff, shank a 32 yarder (the NFL equivalent of missing a tap-in putt for the championship). As thrilled as I was for the Patriots to win, I admit I felt horrible for Cundiff. I still can’t believe he missed that field goal. Going from hero to goat in a matter of seconds will haunt him the rest of his life. “It’s a kick I’ve made a thousand times,” Cundiff said. “I just went out there and didn’t convert. There’s really no excuse for it.” Not that he didn’t try to find an excuse. By Wednesday he said he’d had to unduly rush onto the field because of a scoreboard “malfunction” at the Patriots’ stadium. Something about how he coordinates his pre-kick routine to the scoreboard and thought it was only third down when in fact it was fourth down. Everyone knows how Belichick Belicheats.

For Cundiff it was what you might call trying to escape the belly of the beast—the beast in his case being the agony of defeat and the pillory of the press. In the case of the prophet Jonah, who missed his field goal on purpose, the beast was a big fish. Like Billy Cundiff, Jonah went from hero to goat in a matter of verses. The Lord ordered the prophet to the vile Assyrian Death Star city of Nineveh to warn them of their pending destruction. But Jonah, the only prophet ever to disobey a direct order from God, fled in the opposite direction. He went down to Joppa and bought a boat headed for Tarshish—the veritable end of the earth in those days. Knowing God as he did, where exactly did Jonah think he could hide? The Lord hurled a hurricane at Jonah’s ship to stop its forward progress. The ship’s pagan sailors, fearing the Lord’s fury, in turn hurled Jonah into the sea to stop the storm. Chapter 1 proved a study of contrasts. The pagan sailors respected the Lord more than Jonah did. They were willing to do whatever God wanted, as soon as they could figure it out. Jonah knew exactly what God wanted, but could not stand to be a part of it. The chapter ended with Jonah in the belly of the beast, setting the scene for one last hurl.

In the Veggie Tales Jonah Movie, this moment is set to music. Jonah is played by an asparagus who ponders his grim fate to the tune of a peppy Newsboys song:

Up to my ears

In bitter tears.

Can’t believe I’ve sunk this low

As I walk the plankton

Inner sanctum.

Got outta Dodge,

Sailed on a bon-less

Bon voyage.

You said North,

I headed South.

Tossed overboard.

Good Lord, that’s a really large mouth… \

I’m sleeping with fishes here,

In the belly of the whale.

I’m highly nutritious here,

In the belly of the whale.

Had the book ended here, you’d conclude that to sleep with fishes is to be digested with them too. It wasn’t enough for disobedient Jonah to drown. Make this the end of the story and the huge fish a shark, and the moral would have been “disobey God and you’re doomed.”

But as we know, what looked like Jonah’s demise was in fact his deliverance. Even though Jonah rejected the Lord and disobeyed his commands, God saved him anyway. The belly of the beast became Jonah’s lifeboat of grace. Now I need to resist getting into the plausibility of whether humans can actually survive being swallowed at sea. I remember one Easter hearing a sermon on Jonah devoted to evidence regarding people who had spent various amounts of time lodged inside sea creatures. The Easter text was from Matthew 12 where Jesus treated Jonah’s travail as a sign of his own: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” After that sermon a number of listeners were appalled. They’d brought guests to church only to have the preacher that morning go on and on about how people get eaten by whales and survive? What about a whale’s stomach containing a noxious concoction of highly acidic bile that surely would have consumed Jonah in a matter of hours, not to mention days. Then there’s the likelihood of lost limbs, an open gash or decapitation upon entry due to a whale’s narrow esophagus and many giant, jagged teeth. Is Jesus’ resurrection not hard enough to believe by itself?

The preacher that Easter (not me by the way) used the famous tale of a 19^th century whaler named James Bartley. Bartley was lost overboard in a struggle with a sperm whale but was reportedly found alive in the animal’s stomach when they hauled it aboard minutes later. If it happened to James Bartley it could have happened to Jonah. Unfortunately, evidence—both historical and anatomical—strongly suggests that the Bartley tale was a giant fish story concocted by some sea-faring opportunist eager to generate publicity for a local whale exhibition. The story got passed along to anybody gullible enough to believe it. Christians nevertheless insist that because Jesus treated Jonah literally—comparing his three days in a tomb to Jonah’s three days in a fish—that Jonah had to have been swallowed whole. Does this mean Jonah was dead like Jesus? That would make his regurgitation more like a resurrection. Only God could do that. Which may have been the point.

Jonah definitely considered himself as good as dead. His prayer—a classic Hebrew psalm of thanksgiving—has him descending all the way to the land of the dead. Fleeing God’s command, Jonah first goes down to a ship, and then once overboard, he goes down into the heart of the sea, down through the seaweed that wrapped around his head, down to the roots of the mountains, down the very bottom of the ocean, and ultimately down “to the land”—to the netherworld, to the Pit of Sheol—whose bars closed upon him forever. They say drowning is a horrible way to die. When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. But for Jonah, his consciousness allows him one final plea: “As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you.” And God intervenes. “You brought up my life from the Pit.” Jonah’s prayer comes from inside the fish—an underwater grave that would be his salvation. As with Jesus, death was not the last word.

That Jonah would pray is appropriate. Believer or skeptic, we all come to bleak moments when prayer is all we have left. I’m sure that Billy the Kicker said a prayer as that football hooked to the left. I just finished the best-selling book, Unbroken, by Laura Hildebrand of Seabiscuit fame. In it an Olympic miler and World War II bombardier named Louis Zamperini went down with his plane in the Pacific. He floated for almost two months with the two other survivors, living off rainwater and occasional albatrosses that perched on their heads. Never a religious man, Zamperini nevertheless prayed that if God would get him through this, he’d serve him with the rest of his life. Jesus prayed the same sort of thing in Gethsemane, asking that God might save sinners some other way. God’s answers didn’t come as one would want. That kick stayed left. Louis Zamperini was rescued from sea, but his rescuers were Japanese military who tortured him mercilessly until the end of the war. No sooner did Jesus say Amen than Judas showed up with soldiers to betray him. And while Jonah was saved from drowning, it was only so that he could be eaten alive.

To Jonah’s credit he does equate his being devoured with being delivered. With God, like it or not, life usually comes by way of death. You have to lose your life to find it. Thinking about this can be depressing—which led me this week to the existentialist writings of Søren Kierkegaard. I’ll often read Kierkegaard when I’m having a bad day to make sure I milk it for everything it’s worth. Kierkegaard wrote a lot about human despair. He wrote how person who despairs bears all his past problems as the present. Memories haunt and extend their hampering effects into every moment of your existence. It’s what makes despair feel likes it’s going to go on forever. He wrote, “The most painful state of being is thinking about the future—particularly the future you’ll never have.”

Kierkegaard considered despair to be a basic loss of faith; the refusal to trust God. Despair takes two alternative shapes, he said: Either it is “the despair not to will to be oneself;” that is, the loss of will to be the person God calls you to be. Or it is “the despair to will to be oneself;” that is, the defiant, self-sufficient will which disdains the person God calls you to be. The first kind of despair is indifference while the second kind is arrogance. Arrogance cares only for itself while indifference doesn’t care about anything. We see both of these in Jonah. Jonah thanks God for his salvation, but is indifferent toward the pagan sailors who risked their own lives for his. He says no prayers for them. And though Jonah praises the Lord and promises to go to Temple every Sabbath from now on, he arrogantly includes no willingness to repent and go to Nineveh to do what God commanded.

Kierkegaard labeled despair as The Sickness Unto Death, a borrowed and juxtaposed phrase from John’s gospel. Jesus, when told that his friend Lazarus is sick, replies that “this sickness is not unto death.” Of course, Lazarus did die—Jesus even delays going to him to assure that he would. But in dying and then being raised by Jesus, we get a sneak preview of what Kierkegaard calls “the final death of death by death” that would be fully accomplished by Christ on the cross. “I am the resurrection and the life” Jesus said to Lazarus’ sister Martha in her despair, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” “This sickness is not unto death,” he said, “but for the glory of God, so that the Son of God might be glorified through it.” You might say the same about Jonah. The last line of his prayer reads “Deliverance belongs to the Lord.” Or another way to put it, “Salvation comes from the Lord.” Either way, there are any number of Hebrew words for salvation or deliverance, but Jonah chooses the word yeshua, the same word given as the name for Jesus—another reason, perhaps, that Jesus, yeshua, ties himself so closely to Jonah.

Faith in Jesus often happens at the outer limits of our effort, in that despair where all we have left is a prayer. Confronted by the failure of own capacity and will, we recognize the necessity of that failure. It is only in failure that a lost creature can be finally found. Faith is the decisive act of surrender; we get up by giving up and giving ourselves over to God. “Those who cling to worthless idols,” Jonah prayed, who put their trust in their own capability and power, “forfeit the grace that could be theirs,” Aware of his utter failure and lostness, Jonah surrenders and is cast into the sea and onto the mercy of God. Though the sailors pitched him overboard, Jonah recognizes that God was really the one who did it. It was God who “engulfed me,” whose “waves and billows swept over me.” It was God who pulled Jonah as low as he could go, to the very Pit of Sheol itself, so that Jonah could fully experience God’s grace and be swallowed by it.

Jonah’s deliverance was itself a miraculous Old Testament sneak preview of Jesus’ resurrection. It was something only prayer could accomplish because it was something only God could do. Faith occurs at the outer limits of our effort, in that despair where all we have left is a prayer. Confronted by the failure of own capacity and will, we recognize the necessity of that failure. It is there that a lost creature can be finally found.

For Louis Zamperini, his return to America after years of Japanese torture brought him a hero’s welcome. But it also brought him financial ruin and a slow descent into depression and alcoholism. It wasn’t until his desperate wife dragged him to a Los Angeles Billy Graham Crusade in the 50s that he remembered his promise to God on that life raft. Finally found by Jesus, Zamperini never took another drink, went on to run a camp for disadvantaged teenagers, and got involved at Hollywood Presbyterian Church where he met our own Dave Williamson. Dave wrote me this week about skiing with Zamperini, about his return to Japan in seek out and forgive his torturers. While in Japan at age 81 Zamperini made it back to the Olympics, running a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Nagano Winter Games. Dave says he’s still doing remarkably well at age 95. “Deliverance belongs to the Lord.” In Christ, the lost get found, sinners are redeemed, grace exonerates the guilty, justice comes for the oppressed—and wayward prophets get hurled onto the beach.

Clearly salvation can sometimes be messy. The Veggie Tales movie had Jonah singing as much:

Woke up this morning kinda blue,

Thinking through that age-old question:

How to exit a whale’s digestion?

It might behoove me to be heaved.

Head out like a human comet.

Hmm… I wonder what rhymes with comet?

I couldn’t help but recall Dawn and I flying home one time with Violet standing at our feet on the plane. She turned and gave us that funny look kids get before they throw up all over you. And then she threw up all over us. We still had a couple of hours left in the air. Taking for granted that whale vomit can only be worse than an toddler’s, Jonah had a lot of cleaning up to do. While we can do nothing to earn our salvation, we still must do something to show we’ve received it. Having experienced the deep grace of God, Jonah gets another shot at obedience. Chapter 3 will open with the Lord repeating his command to get up and go to Nineveh. Will Jonah do it? Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “It can be so hard to believe God, because it is so hard to obey God.” May Christ help us do both.

Jonah 1

by Daniel Harrell

Epiphany, which commemorates the first revelation of Jesus to Gentiles (the Gentiles in this case being the magi), is the perfect time of the year to think about outreach and mission. Inasmuch Jesus was sent to the world as the embodiment of God, so the church is sent as the embodiment of Jesus to love and to serve and to grow his kingdom. Tonight at our potluck dinner we’re excited to share a new outreach initiative we’re thinking about. Outreach is the only reason that the church remains on earth. Everything else we do is just a preview of heaven. Granted, the earthbound nature of mission does make it rough. It was deadly for Jesus—and for much of the New Testament church and many Christians since. Ask any missionary, and if they’re honest, they’ll have all kinds of adversity to tell you about. The same goes for any Christian who steps it up and steps out for the sake of the gospel. Just try to do what Jesus says: love an enemy, serve the poor, speak the truth, share the gospel, forgive an abuser, give away money, fight for justice—you’ll find it can be a tough way to live. (more…)

Mark 12:41-44

by Daniel Harrell

Epiphany, which for church calendar devotees commemorates the Magi’s visit to Bethlehem not only stretches out Christmas (falling as it does on January 6), but historically ranks right up there in importance with Easter and Pentecost. Epiphany was celebrated not because three kings or wise men (actually we have no idea how many there were) traversed afar. Epiphany was celebrated because the Magi were not Jewish. Their meeting Jesus constituted the first revelation of Christ to Gentiles. This is of monumental importance to the Church because the church grew to be comprised almost totally of Gentiles, in fulfillment, ironically, of Old Testament prophecy. That the Magi bore extravagant gifts of worship to Christ signified their immense gratitude to God for reaching out beyond the bounds of Israel’s covenant to include even them. When it comes down to it, for all Christians our giving is ultimately an act of gratitude and worship. We see it with the Magi, we see it presumably with this sacrificial gift from a destitute widow who drops two copper coins in the Temple treasury.

Philippians 1:3-12

by Daniel Harrell

Happy New Year. We begin again. And Merry Christmas too! Clearly with the hymns we’ve sung this morning we are still officially in Christmas. Eight maids-a-milking to be exact. According to the church calendar, Christmas runs until January 5, which I think is great since Christmas is an exponentially better holiday once you get past December 25. It’s been nice not to having to travel this year—though we did miss time with our families back east. A number of you were worried about that. You’d ask what we were doing for Christmas, and we’d reply how we were just staying put. You’d then assume that meant we had family coming out here, but we’d say nope, just us. The something like a mild panic would appear across your face. “Can you have Christmas without family?” And then, uh-oh, “does this mean we should invite the Reverend over to our house for Christmas?” I understand the panic. Having the Reverend show up at your house for Christmas dinner is not like having Santa Claus. You have to be on your best behavior for both of us but at least Santa brings presents.

Had we traveled to North Carolina where my family abides, we would have gathered at my grandmother’s house for some fine, gut-busting southern cooking. The highlight would have been my grandmother’s roast turkey and cornbread dressing soaked in a sweet lard-enriched gravy. Like drinking butter only better. You could feel your arteries harden with every morsel. It’s good eating. As it was we stayed here and as I need me some roasted something for Christmas to be Christmas, I roasted a goose that I shot out by the pond here (I’m kidding about that last part). If you’ve ever roasted a goose you know that it puts off a lot of fat—making for some serious gravy—just like my grandmother’s. We put out an all call on Facebook and around the church and delightfully ended up with two other Christmas-orphaned families at our table. They ate up that goose too—especially the ten-year-old boy who did his best impression of Tiny Tim. I’m surprised he didn’t sprout feathers given all the poultry he consumed.

Dawn and I were talking about how much we enjoyed this entire Christmas season—the gatherings, the beautiful church services, the lights, even the lack of snow. It was just like North Carolina. And yet I’m still amazed with how abruptly everything coems to a halt every December 26. “Joy to the world” and then back to work. Everybody starts fretting about year end finances and gift returns and getting to all those things you put off until “after the holidays.” There’s some momentary hope for a new year—except that you have to make resolutions and try to keep them more than a week. And of course the Iowa Caucuses are on Tuesday. So much for peace on earth. Was this what it was like that first Christmas?

Take the shepherds. Did you ever wonder what happened to them after the herald angels sang and they got back from the manger? What do you do once you’ve seen a Messiah? Luke tells us they ran to town and amazed everyone with their report, but afterwards we presume they went back to their fields to keep watch over their flocks by night again. There wouldn’t be much action on the Messiah front for another thirty years. Were they discouraged? Concerned? Worried that they had imagined the whole thing? Christmas can sometimes be that way. Which is why it’s good that there’s a verse in the Bible like Philippians 1:6—“the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”

It’s one of the best loved verses of Scripture. I remember receiving a framed, cross-stitched rendition of Philippians 1:6 many years ago. It was crafted for me by an old girlfriend as her way (I think) of reminding me that I had plenty of room for improvement. It’s a great verse for New Year’s Day. January 1^st draws out our deep longing for the future and a commitment to change, to work harder to make it happen this time or fix it so it won’t happen again. And yet having tried and failed so many times, most of us refrain from New Year’s resolutions because we know we can’t keep them. Better to just avoid the disappointment. But according to Philippians 1:6 you don’t have to try so hard anymore. God’s doing all the work. He has you covered.

Paul embedded this verse within an extended salutation wherein he thanks the Philippians for their monetary support. He describes this support as their sharing or “partnership” in the gospel, a translation of the Greek word koinonia which we typically translate as fellowship. Koinonia means to have all things in common; it’s where we get words like community and communion. Koinonia was epitomized in the book of Acts church where no one had any tangible needs because everything was communally shared. In this way fellowship is connected to stewardship, which we will emphasize next Sunday. Remember to bear your pledge cards for 2012 to church as we partner in the gospel once again together as a community. We will give because God gave to us. He brought us into community with himself as participants in the gospel of grace and if you have truly experienced grace, then you know how impossible it is to hoard it. You have to give it away. Paul prays for the Philippians that their love and grace may overflow more and more. Grace is what makes the church the church.

The koinonia of Philippians 1 is certainly economic. The life and mission of the church always requires financial support, therefore God spurs our giving until his return on “the day of Jesus Christ.” However, for Paul, the only New Testament author who uses the word koinonia, partnership or community also goes beyond resource sharing. For Paul any koinonia of material resources derived from a deeper koinonia of Spirit. In Galatians, Paul speaks of the right hand of fellowship (koinonia), which we extend to each other whenever we pass the peace. More than a handshake, the right hand of koinonia tangibly acknowledges our common bond through the Holy Spirit. In 1 Corinthians, Paul speaks of communion as our koinonia in the body and blood of Jesus. More than bread and wine, communion tangibly acknowledges our fellowship in Jesus’ death and resurrection: His dying and rising will be our dying and rising too. No longer fearful of any condemnation because of our sin, the communion table assures us that we will rise to feast with Jesus as sure as eating my grandmother’s turkey on Christmas Eve. God who began his good work in us will get it done.

Specifically described as God’s good work yet to be completed, Paul’s emphasis is plainly on the future. His reference is to God’s saving work, which we all know takes a lifetime. Christians might customarily speak of somebody getting saved, but in reality we’re just as much people in the process of being saved. Like Peter who sank when he tried to walk on the open sea, our troubles and doubts still overwhelm us and drag us down too.

Paul penned Philippians from a prison cell, with no guarantee of earthly release. Which is why he described God’s good work as not yet completed. But unlike our own familiarity with unfinished work, there’s no question that God will not finish what he started. God operates from the future where the end has already happened. His good work is already a good job to be fully revealed on the day Christ comes back. His good work is as good as done. The focus of Christian hope is not on the future but on God for whom the future is present; the focus is not our creaturely destiny but on the God who destines us; we no longer worry about the end, but trust in the God who draws us toward his glorious ends. This is all that really matters, Paul writes. Our hope for a certain future makes the present immensely livable.

So instead of spending the rest of your New Year’s Day trying to make resolutions you know that you’ll break, trust God instead. Practice your resolutions as if they’re already kept. Paul encourages the Philippians and us to be pure and blameless not because we could if they tried, but because in Christ we already are. This is true even when we spectacularly fail because then we get to show what genuine repentance and resurrection look like. To be Christian is not to be flawless, but honest and humble and brave and full of grace.

God is the one who began a good work among us and it is God who will bring it to completion. Christian hope is based on his work in us, not on ourselves or our own ability. Christian hope fosters no illusions of human self-improvement. As opposed to optimists who look on the bright side and deny the effects of evil and sin, Christian hope understands that any real hope cannot found itself upon human potential or wishful thinking. Christian hope sees the effects of evil and sin for the tragedies they are, but then translates them into what they really are by the power of the cross. Suffering, rather than meaningless pain or just desserts, translates into meaningful redemption and reinforced character. Death, rather than a terrifying end to be feared, becomes the gateway to life. Christian weaves life’s tragedies into the necessary pattern of resurrection, pointing toward that day, when by grace, all things will be made new.

And because God will do this, the good end is as sure as my grandmother’s turkey on Christmas Eve—even when I’m not there to enjoy it. Actually it’s even surer than that. The fact is, my grandmother stopped roasting turkeys a few Christmases ago. After 50-some Christmases, she turned 80 and decided she was tired frankly of cooking. That first year without her turkey and dressing was spent at my aunt’s house feasting on fried chicken wings and cold shrimp and pork sausage balls. I understood, but I was really disappointed. Christmas just wasn’t the same without a big bird from the oven. So when Dawn and I got back to Boston, the first order of business was a trip to the grocery store. I needed me some roasted something for Christmas to be Christmas.

Since we were still technically in Christmas when we returned, like today, there was still time. However when I went to the poultry case, all they stocked were these 20 pound monster turkeys which would have meant 10 pounds of meat per person (that’s me and Dawn, Violet thinks turkey are fowl—ba-ba-boom). But turkey was tradition and the grocery store was running a special ($7 off with my shopping card), so I figured why not? I lugged the bird to the check-out line and watched to see the discount beep on the screen above the cash register, you know the one that displays your “savings” once they scan your card. However the turkey discount never appeared. So I called the cashier’s attention to this discrepancy and showed her the tag on the turkey, fully expecting to receive the $7 discount to which I was entitled. She said, “You know what this means?” Sure, I said, it means I get $7 off my turkey anyway. “No,” she informed me, “if it’s not in the scanner it means you get it for free!” Wow! Merry Christmas! I gave her a high-five and left with a totally unexpected, unmerited free 20-pound bird just like Scrooge’s gift to the Cratchets on Christmas morning.

OK, so obviously this is an experience in search of something to illustrate, so here it is: God who began His good work among us will carry it to completion by the day of Christ Jesus as sure as turkey at Christmas however that turkey shows up. Because it is God who does it, it does get done. But because it is God who does it, it doesn’t always get done is ways you expect. It gets done through suffering and death, through tragedies and troubles, through endings that transform into beginnings, through grace you receive though you never deserve it. God always finishes what he starts and therefore we confidently hope. Our koinonia in the body and blood of Jesus points to our koinonia in Christ’s death and resurrection as well as our koinonia in a free Christmas feast that promises to last into eternity.

Revelation 22:1-17

by Daniel Harrell

Advent, meaning coming or arrival first appeared in church liturgies not as a Christmas ramp-up, but as a Judgment Day wake-up. By setting its sights on Jesus’ second coming instead of his first, Advent affirms that line in the Creed where Jesus “will come to judge the living and the dead.” Christ will come to right the wrongs of injustice and exalt the humble. Christ will come and make all things new. Advent counters the rampant despair and cynicism common to life in an unjust world, while at the same time fighting against any backsliding and backbiting common among Christians who’ve decided that Jesus isn’t really paying attention. “Keep awake,” he warned in the gospels, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. If the owner of a house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Not that Jesus is coming back as a burglar—just unexpectedly like one. And he’s coming back soon, he said—three times in this chapter of Revelation alone. But given the delay, some 2000 years and counting, some prefer to translate Jesus as saying, “I am coming back quickly,” to emphasize the suddenness over the soonness. Any talk of Jesus coming back at all inevitably leads to Revelation, a book everyone says they want to read until they actually start reading it. You’re attracted to its vivid imagery, symbolism and predictions: Those crazy creatures that look like nothing found in nature—multi-faced animals with wings and eyes in places you’d never want them to be. There’s the numbers that don’t quite add up and funny looking angels with scrolls and lamps and bowls and horns that do battle against evil mythical enemies with bizarre names like Gog and Magog who end up cooked up into a final grim supper of burning flesh, the carrion of evil eaten by the victors. It can get pretty gruesome.

Nevertheless, Revelation has inspired countless sermons, works of art and musical compositions from the mighty Hallelujah Chorus to the tender strains of It Is Well With My Soul. It has also fueled social upheaval and sectarian religious movements which were founded and then foundered on what were thought to be surefire decipherments of Revelation’s secrets. Frenzied Biblical prophecy bloodhounds with rapture-ready sun roofs, eager not to be left behind, scrutinize every geopolitical development, technological advancement and social crisis for clues as to the exact time of Jesus’ arrival (this despite Jesus’ own insistence that nobody but God knows the date). Others, mocking these misguided efforts, display snarky bumper stickers such as: “In the event of rapture, can I have your car?” Confusion over Revelation’s meaning proves so exasperating that in the end, most people are all too happy to put it back on the shelf. Martin Luther thought that it shouldn’t even be in the Bible.

Of course taking Revelation out of the Bible doesn’t really remove it. Just about everything Revelation foretells first appears some place else. Turn to Isaiah or Ezekiel or Daniel in the Old Testament, or the gospels or Peter and Paul in the New, and there you’ll find practically all of Revelation’s themes. For instance, Jesus’ own glorious return finally fulfills Daniel 7, which is stocked full of bizarre animals and complex numbers and judgment thrones and plenty of fire. Daniel sees a son of man riding in on clouds who’s crowned King of kings and Lord of lords—as Jesus himself reiterates in the gospels. Revelation adds the “soon” part—which for those checking their watches is a problem. Given the delay, concerned timekeepers suggest “soon” to mean Jesus coming back in the crises of life or at the point of each individual’s death. But applying this to Revelation just complicates everything more. I think a better solution comes from St. Peter who insists how “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” I like that God waits as long as it takes in order that all might believe.

However waiting for all to believe doesn’t mean that everyone will. Patience has its limits. Even at the end there remain those outside the Pearly Gates: “dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and lives lies;” that is, everyone who refused to take a bath in the blood of the Lamb. Jesus promises to “repay according to everyone’s work,” the evil and filthy as well as the holy and righteous. This is why Luther wanted to hit the delete button. Where’s the justification by faith alone? Do you show up at the Pearly Gates only to have Peter pull a fast one and ask for your resume? While you can do nothing to earn God’s grace, you still must do something to show you’ve received it. Jesus was clear that you can’t just call him Lord and then refuse to do what he says. You can tell a tree by its fruit, Jesus said. Your treatment of the poor and sick and hungry and imprisoned will show what you think of him. Right in line with the holidays, turns out that Jesus is making a list and checking it twice too.

Revelation labels his list “the Lamb’s Book of Life,” and its contents are those whose lives bear good fruit, by grace. The new covenant God promised in Jeremiah promised to write the law on your heart so you’d know what is right to do by heart. But since that might not be enough, God promised through Ezekiel to provide you with a new heart. What salvation demands, God provides. “Let everyone who is thirsty take the water of life as a gift,” says the Spirit, who is the Spirit of Jesus. As he said to the woman at the well, “Whoever drinks the water I give him never thirst. The water I give will become a spring of water within welling up to eternal life.” Water and spirit go together—what flows in must flow out. Eternal life is not just about getting your name in the book. Eternal life has to be lived. Jesus said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart, out of your gut, shall flow rivers of living water.’”

We’ve talked a lot about water this fall, and here in Revelation all the streams converge. The sea—that satanic abode of chaos, disorder and darkness that appeared at creation—has swallowed up Satan and dried up itself. In its place there’s the river of life flowing from “the throne and the Lamb,” meaning from Jesus himself. Abundant fruit-bearing trees of life line the banks, reminiscent of Ezekiel’s miracle river flowing from the Temple of God modeled after heaven itself. It’s a Temple that never got built, you’ll recall, because in heaven there’s no need for a building to house God’s presence. There’s no need to shield his glory from sinners. God’s creatures no longer hide their faces in shame and seek refuge in the shadows. Instead, washed clean, we freely step into the light and look on God’s face. The Old Testament warned that nobody could see God’s face and live, a danger that mandated the high priest to identify himself with God’s name stamped on his forehead each year as he annually stepped into the Holy of Holies to make atonement. However in heaven there is no more atonement and no more fear. Everyone wears the name of God on their foreheads here.

The Lord makes everything new, so much so that we probably should call the end times the new times, or even better, the good times, given what finally transpires. There’s no more death or mourning or crying or pain. No more terminal illnesses, no more incurable diseases, no more fatal accidents or funeral services. No more dysfunctional families or broken relationships. There’s no more problem of evil because there’s no more evil. God allows no more suffering because there is no more suffering to allow. There’s no need for sun and moon anymore because the glory of God provides all the light—a light that so shines in the darkness that darkness becomes as day.

It’s literally heaven on earth. Unlike popular depictions, we don’t die and go to heaven. A huge slice of heaven comes down to us. John writes how he “saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” The new Jerusalem is both a place and a people, or more specifically, the redeemed of Christ are the place where God now dwells. So sure is this future that Revelation speaks of it as having already happened. John writes, “I saw the Holy City (past tense), coming down out of heaven from God.” Christ has already come by his spirit to live in us. Eternity has already started. You might say we’re in the final descent. All that awaits is a safe landing and that joyous, never-ending reunion.

I don’t know how many of you travel for the holidays. Living away from North Carolina as long as I have, I’ve flown home for Christmas countless times. I always love how folks gather at the security entrance to welcome their loved ones, arms outstretched with ear to ear smiles. Unfortunately, with security being what it is these days, it can take a while to get from the plane to those welcoming arms. Many of us will remember how they used to let people through security gates without a boarding pass. Family and friends could be there to greet you as soon as you appeared out of the tunnel. I loved the way you used to pop right out then right into those open arms. I loved it so much that it made me sad for people who had nobody waiting for them at the gate. So sad, in fact, that as a teenager (living as I did in a rather boring town), a bunch of us kids, for fun, would go out to the airport to greet lonely people as they came off their flights. We’d stand there with wide grins on our faces, waving and looking until we spotted someone who had nobody there to welcome them home. We’d walk up to these perfect strangers, our arms outstretched, and give them a big hello and a hug, telling them how happy we were that they had arrived safely, and how was their trip, and have a great day in our boring little town or wherever your final destination may be. They’d look at us all confused—“do I know you?”—and no doubt thought us crazy, and yet nobody refused the hug, overcome as they were by our spirited welcome. After their initial confusion, they’d usually hug back, say thank you and then leave the terminal with a shake of the head and smile on their faces—smiles I’d like to think they passed on to others.

OK, it was a weird thing for a bunch of kids to do (we’d probably get arrested for it these days), but it’s really no weirder than anything you read in Revelation. And it’s no weirder that anything you read about Christmas either. Sure, Mary and Joseph don’t have to deal with multi-headed animals and other crazy creatures, bowls and blazes and beasts and bad math, but there are plenty of angels and heavenly trumpets and shining stars. There’s Mary getting pregnant by the Holy Spirit—like anybody was going to believe that. And then there’s God showing up as a baby in a feed trough amidst poverty and scandal and threats from a homicidal, anti-Christ monarch. There’s dreams and forced holiday travel and side trips to Egypt, just so that prophecies can get fulfilled. And this is all without mentioning how the rest of the story turns out, what with a man walking on water and raising the dead before rising from the dead himself. Oh, and then promising he’ll fly back down someday soon to wipe out all the evil and death and despair and dysfunction and greed and sin that presses so hard against any peace on earth and goodwill among people. The only way to keep the weird stuff out of Christmas is to keep your Bible shut.

I was reading this past week about the ever-popular Charlie Brown Christmas Special that’s on TV every yuletide season. CBS commissioned the special in 1965, to be written by Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz, who included a scene where Linus reads from the gospel of Luke. Schultz was told that “You can’t have the Bible on television,” but he did it anyway, absolutely appalling the CBS executives. The special opened with Charlie Brown moaning about how Christmas was coming, “but I don’t feel happy.” What kid says that? It got worse. There was jazz music. And no laugh track. Wobbly kid’s voices. Charlie Brown constantly criticizing the crass commercialism of the Christmas season. And worst of all, Linus reading the Bible on an empty stage and proclaiming that’s what Christmas is all about? What would the sponsors think? The CBS execs declared it a flop and said they would air the film once (since they’d been promoting it for weeks sight unseen). But then they would consign it to then can, never to see the light of day again. Of course it was a huge hit. Almost half of the nation’s television viewers watched in 1965. It won an Emmy. And we’ve been watching every year for  the past 46 years. Of course if you watched this year you’ll notice they shortened the special again—to make room for more commercials.

In the end, if you read the Bible, the final answer to reining in the greed that drives Christmas commercialization, or to redeeming the dysfunction that drives relationships apart this time of year, or to righting the wrongs of injustice and ending the evil that takes no break for the holidays—the final answer to life’s troubles and sin does not lie in better television or in our ability to make a better world, but in God’s power to make a new one. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Jesus says. “And I am coming soon, soon, soon.” To which the Spirit and the bride say, “Come on then.” And for all who weary and thirsty, including ourselves, we say it too: “Amen. Come Lord Jesus.”

Mark 6:45-52

by Daniel Harrell

Advent means arrival, but it might as well mean to wait. Advent waits for sunlight to reemerge out of darkness and for Christ to be born once again. Historically speaking, however, Advent has always waited more for Christ’s second coming than for his first. Advent showed up on church calendars to point toward that day when God’s kingdom fully comes and all things are made new. In the meantime, with the resurrection providing the down payment, we occupy in-between spaces. Ours is a kingdom not yet. But it’s a kingdom already here too. Christ has come, and Christ will come again.

In the meantime, our waiting, while on the one hand joyful, it’s not always what you expect. You come to church looking for an Advent Wreath and get five candles in fishbowls instead (come to church and see it!). Waiting can be unexpected and uncomfortable. Ask any expectant mother. In-between space can be distressing too. Ask anybody who’s in-between jobs, or in-between relationships, or in-between treatments. Ask Jesus’ disciples here in Mark, stuck in-between shores in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, on a boat getting slammed by howling headwinds. Straining against their oars, all they could do was wait for the storm to subside, for the sun to rise, for land to appear. The last thing they expected was for Jesus to show up walking on water.

We’ve spent our Sundays this fall looking at water in the Bible—which is why the Advent fishbowls. We’ve looked at the chaotic waters of creation all the way to last week’s living water from the well of life. This Sunday’s amazing water story is so familiar that it no longer amazes much anymore. We simply take for granted that Jesus walked on water or he wouldn’t be Jesus. We take it for granted like drinking water out of a tap. Not that everybody can take drinking water for granted. Nearly one billion people still lack access to safe water. It’s estimated to cost only something like $20 billion dollars to make clean water available to everyone without it. I say “only 20 billion” because we Americans spend $450 billion dollars on Christmas every year. For a number of seasons a movement known as the Advent Conspiracy has challenged Christians to bypass a few useless Christmas gifts and give the money to relief organizations working to provide clean drinking water. Astronauts living in the International Space Station get plenty of fresh water—delivered by rocket ship, at a cost of $42 thousand dollars a gallon. If we can get drinking water into orbit, no thirsty human community is out of reach. Though I should mention that the water’s gotten a lot cheaper on the space station. Now on board is a recycling system that turns urine, and even sweat back into drinking water.

If such human ingenuity has the capacity to get clean water to all who thirst, maybe we can figure out how to walk on water too? I ran across out this video promoting a new sport based upon Jesus’ watery feat. It’s called Liquid Mountaineering.

Before these blokes came along, the only living thing capable of running on water aside from water bugs and Jesus (who walked) was a basilisk, also known as the Jesus Lizard [show photo]. You’ll find them in rain forest rivers and streams. Two Harvard biologists calculated that in order to mimic this lizard, a person would need to run about 67 mph. Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet currently, can only manage about 23 mph. How did these liquid mountaineers do it? They used a submerged dock. Some fancy camera work. That’s right, a shoe company faked the video to sell water repellent shoes.

You’re not surprised, but admit it, you’re a little disappointed. You wanted to believe but you knew it was too good to be real. The disciples knew it was too good to be real too. There was no fancy camera work or shoe companies to blame in the first century, so the only explanation was a ghostly one. It was the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean and in the middle of howling winds—what else but a ghost walks on water? The disciples screamed when they saw Jesus coming. Was this why Jesus intended to pass them by? So as not to scare them? Or had he simply grown annoyed by their faithlessness and wanted to teach them a lesson?

I asked my Wednesday night sermon study group what wasn’t familiar about this familiar story, and they said it was this last line of verse 48: “Jesus intended to pass them by.” How do you explain that? In the preceding verses, Jesus graciously (and miraculously) feeds five thousand hungry people, then sends his disciples ahead in a boat so he can have a few minutes to himself, sees that they’re in trouble at sea (which at night at that distance was some serious eyesight), immediately responds by miraculously stepping out onto the water, comes close enough to terrify them, only to then walk by them and leave them to drown? It hardly sounds like the Jesus we know.

Of course the good news is that Jesus doesn’t pass them by. He tells them, “Take heart, fear not, it is I.” You hear “fear not” a lot at Christmastime. In the Bible you hear it whenever God passes by. The verb isn’t about avoidance but about full disclosure. Jesus wanted to show his disciples his true identity. Mark throws out all sorts of clues. Jesus doesn’t go up to pray on just any mountain, but on the mountain—mountains were always the place God showed up in the Old Testament. Jesus says “it is I”, which is the same as saying “I AM,” the name God used for himself atop Mount Sinai. There’s wind and rough water, which as you should know by now is typically the setting for divine intervention. It was the wind of God over the rough waters of chaos that led to creation. It was the wind of God over the floodwaters of Noah that led to the ark’s rescue. It was the wind of God on the Red Sea breakwaters that led Israel to safety and doomed the Egyptian army. “To pass by” was what God did for Moses back in Exodus on a mountain in a storm so that Moses might catch a glimpse of God’s glory and believe.

In Mark 4, Jesus calmed his first storm, which also freaked out his disciples. He asked them why they were so afraid and did they still have no faith. They responded by asking each other, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Jesus answers that question here in chapter 6. He passes by on water in a storm so that they might catch a glimpse of his glory and believe. But the disciples still don’t get it. Mark says its because “they didn’t understand about the loaves,” which refers back to feeding the 5000. What didn’t they understand? The only other time that so much bread appeared out of nowhere was when God fed his stranded people with manna in the desert. Wink, wink. But like their Israelite ancestors who could never get it either, the disciples’ hearts were too hard. Their skulls were too thick. People don’t walk on water. Jesus must be a ghost. He can’t be the Son of God.

Ironically, in Mark’s gospel, the only ones who ever recognize Jesus to be the Son of God were ghosts—evil spirits and demons. And in Mark’s gospel it’s a 1] Gentile 2] woman with a 3] demon-possessed daughter (three strikes in first century Jewish culture) who’s the first human to call Jesus “Lord”. There is something about being an outsider that makes it easier to see the real thing. I once read this book about a Christian and an atheist who went to church together. They met when the atheist auctioned his soul on eBay as sort of a joke, only to have the Christian buy it for 500 dollars. But rather than make the atheist convert (if indeed that were possible), the Christian made the atheist go to church and give some honest feedback.

The atheist observed how odd it was to go to churches and be asked to greet the people seated around you. “Why do you have to tell people to talk to each other?” he wondered. “Shouldn’t Christians naturally care about each other enough to greet one another without being told?” He went on to share the story of a buddy of his strung out on cocaine who came to Jesus and got clean. The buddy said all these Christians surrounded him and loved on him and really looked after him. But then when he relapsed six months later, he was too ashamed to tell his new Christian friends. Turns out he was afraid they might think him a hypocrite and kick him out of church—as if grace had a statute of limitations. I can empathize. I’ll hesitate to confess my own screw-ups sometimes because I’m not so sure that forgiveness is always out there. Or maybe I hesitate because I can be unforgiving myself. Even though God forgives me every time.

How much grace does it take to believe in Jesus? How many miracles does he have to do? Mark says the disciples “didn’t understand about the loaves.” So what did Jesus do? He miraculously fed 4000 more people one chapter later. He then gets back into a boat with them, but packs only one loaf of bread for the trip. Wink, wink. What did the disciples do? They argued over who forgot to bring enough bread. Seriously? They’d now seen Jesus feed over 9000 people with just a few slices and they’re worried about running out of bread? Some scholars suggest that the disciples didn’t want to impose on Jesus to fed them too because performing miracles seemed to irritate him so. But it’s not feeding hungry people that ever irritated Jesus. It’s their thick heads and hard hearts. He says to his disciples, “You have eyes—can’t you see? You have ears—can’t you hear? Don’t you remember anything at all? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” “Twelve,” they replied. “And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” “Seven,” they replied. And Jesus said to them, “Do you not yet understand?” Despite the exasperation, a ring of expectation appears. The disciples do not understand—not yet. But they will. Maybe Jesus’ question isn’t so much a rebuke as it is an invitation.

In Matthew’s take on the story, Peter accepts Jesus’ invitation to try walking on water himself. He does not yet understand—but he’s willing to try. Peter said, “Lord, if it is really you, command me to come to you on the water.” So Jesus said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water toward Jesus. But when he saw the strong wind and the waves, he got scared and started to sink. He cried out, “Lord, save me!” And Jesus immediately reached out his hand and grabbed him, and said to Peter, “You have so little faith, why did you doubt?” Then they climbed back into the boat, and the wind ceased. This time, everybody in the boat worshiped Jesus, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Maybe the reason the disciples get it in Matthew and not in Mark is because Matthew was one of the disciples and didn’t want to look so bad. Why highlight your thick-headedness any more than you have to? Of course even the disciples’ faith at this point wasn’t enough to keep them from deserting Jesus once the crucifixion trouble started. It wouldn’t be until the Holy Spirit broke through their thick heads that they’d have enough faith. Jesus had to do that miracle too. But isn’t that how grace works? On the cross, Jesus gave himself for us that he might give himself to us—depositing his own spirit deep inside our thick heads and hard hearts—so that we can finally believe.

By Danielle Jones
Sunday, November 27, 2011

This week, we have yet another take on water, this one from the gospel of John. This story is a familiar water story- an interaction between Jesus and a woman around a well.

Jesus, in the process of heading back to Galilee- decides to take a detour through a Samaritan city called Sychar. As he is walking through Samaria he makes a stop (around noon) at Jacob’s well to rest and in hopes of getting something to drink. While there, he finds a Samaritan woman who has come to draw water and he asks her for a drink.

A simple enough situation to begin with but much more complex than at first glance as we read on. Jesus first appears to be the one who is thirsty and in need but we quickly see it is the woman who is truly thirsty. Jesus is a Jew- someone who shouldn’t want to set foot in Samaria and he finds himself if the center of town talking to a Samaritan- someone most Jews would have gone out of their way to avoid.

Jews and Samaritans were notorious enemies. While on a journey to Galilee from Judea- an average Jew would have avoided the direct route through Samaria and would have gone to great lengths- even adding hours to his trip- just to avoid coming in contact with a Samaritan.

The differences and disagreements between Jews and Samaritans were religious in nature. Samaritans took over a central section of Jewish ancient territory and then claimed to be the true descendants of Abraham while the Jews believed they were the true descendants.

Jews and Samaritans sometimes fought but more often they simply did all they could to avoid one another. And so this woman is shocked to be asked for water from first a Jew, who was supposed to try and avoid her, and second a man, who was supposed to disrespect her and stay away from her.

Listen to these words from one rabbinical writing to help shed light on the ways men and women interacted in those days- the instruction by the rabbis read “one should not talk with a woman on the street, not even with his own wife, and certainly not with somebody else’s wife, because of the gossip of men.” Some teachings went even further to say- “don’t even talk with your sister in public for fear of what others might say”.

So when the woman says to Jesus- “How is it that you , a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” Jesus answers “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

Irony abounds in this story, as it does in so many stories in John’s gospel. What looks at first like a thirsty man needing a drink from a woman who is drawing water from a well- instead becomes a woman in need of water, living water, from a man without a bucket at that same well. God is like that isn’t he? Ironic. Surprising. Unexpected.

The truth of God’s surprises always stare us in the face during Advent as we retell the story of a virgin mother who bears a son. And this first Sunday in Advent is no different. This seemingly inconsequential birth- becomes the first in a chain of events that God will use to transform the world. At first glance, who would have known?

Likewise, this offer of living water to a woman at a well- is another event in a long chain of life changing and world changing events that Jesus set into motion- through his life, death and resurrection. The water that Jesus has to offer isn’t found in a well at all- but is instead found through the power of the Holy Spirit- often referred to as living water throughout scripture. We see the human thirst of Jesus, the heart thirst of the woman and the quenching power of the Holy Spirit, come together in this scene, at the well.

When Jesus offers living water to the woman she responds by saying, “give me this water- so that I may never be thirsty again or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

I have a feeling this woman likely loathed drawing water from that well. The well was the meeting place for the women in town. Early in the morning and later in the evening the women would come-each and every day- to get water for their families, yes, but also to exchange gossip, to tell stories and to share news. Not the place you want to hang out at- if you are the outcast in town.

This woman tired out by her story and ashamed of how she was living- avoided the social aspects of the well- by going to draw water in the middle of the day. Upon hearing that she could have this “living water” her first response is- please can I have it- then I won’t have to keep coming here to draw water day after day and I can finally- once and for all- avoid being humiliated.

The woman is missing the point. Instead of giving the woman the water HE was talking about on the spot- Jesus says, “Go, call your husband and come back.” The woman replies- with a somewhat ironic reply- saying-I have no husband. Jesus says “True you don’t have one husband- you have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.”

Jesus cuts through to the real issue by confronting the woman with the truth of her life circumstances and the truth of her sin.

What is amazing to me in this interaction, isn’t the love of Jesus. If you have ever read the gospels straight through- by the time you get to the gospel of John, you have already seen story after story of the love of Jesus played out in peoples lives- what is amazing to me about this story is the response of the woman when Jesus exposes her sin.

For most of us, our worst fear is to be found out and to have our sins exposed.

When I was five years old I had a little sin of my own that was exposed. On a warm summer day my mom had promised to take me to the pool to go swimming. Anxious and excited to head to cool off on a warm summer day I was driving my mother crazy- asking her over and over again how much longer until we left. And so my mom told me to go wait in the front yard for her as she finished gathering what we would need for the afternoon.

I ran outside to our driveway where a gold Pontiac something or another sat begging me to jump in. That car was literally bigger than the living room in the house I currently live in. Somehow I got that car door open and climbed in to the front seat and I did what any five year old would do- I cooly slid over to the drivers seat where I pretended that I was driving the car and that we were already off to the pool.

My pretending to move the car became me literally moving the car as I pulled the gear shift into reverse and that giant, gold Pontiac started rolling backwards down our driveway. And didn’t stop until it had rolled right smack into our neighbors 100 year old silver maple tree. Terrified- I did what any five year old would do- I jumped out of the car and ran right back into my house and- hid under my bed, for almost an hour.

My physical, visceral response to my sin- was to hide- immediately. Some days- my response to sin is still that way. I think to myself that my worst fears will be realized if my sins are “found out” by the people in my life.

So many of us find ourselves thinking things like- “if she only knew what I said about her” or “if he only knew what I did to him” or how about “if he sees that bill before I get home” or “if she sees those text messages on my phone”… well we can’t even bear to think what would happen with our loved ones and we certainly don’t even engage the thought of “what would God think about all of this”.

But this woman was different. She didn’t go and hide, she didn’t even walk away. The woman’s response to having her sins exposed by the son of the living God- was not even to deny that she has had five husbands, but instead she says “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.”

Wanting to test her prophet theory she decides to ask Jesus to settle a dispute the Jews and Samaritans had when she says “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Face to face with her past and present life and sin- the woman ironically changes the subject to an age old debate between samaritans and jews- the debate about where and how to worship.

At this point, Jesus is done with irony in this conversation with the woman and he says- don’t worry about where to worship, that is not the point of all this- the day is coming when the true worshippers will worship God in spirit and truth. You can almost hear Jesus thinking- don’t miss this- I said living water- where you worship doesn’t matter anymore- it is what is in your heart that is really going to matter now.

Just then, the disciples are back- ironically- with food, when what Jesus had been wanting was water and in fact all he has been talking about is water. When given food he says to them “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” And then he says to them- join me- the harvest time is now- go and reap the harvest that has been sown for you. Leave it to Jesus to turn something nice that someone did for him into a teachable moment.

It’s not time to eat just yet- it is time to harvest- and in fact, as the story shows in the end someone had already started that harvest and was leading the way for them. The woman from the well has gone to tell her story saying “come see this man who has told me everything I have ever done.”

No hiding under the bed for this sinner- and no more hiding at the well at noon either. This woman moves from the kind shame and embarrassment that would cause someone to avoid everyone she could by drawing water in the heat of the day, and turns her into someone who goes as fast as she can to find any one who will listen to her- to not only to confess her sin to them- but to tell them about Jesus, the Messiah, the living God and this living water that she can’t live without.

And in response to her story- The people go to see and hear the word of Jesus and John’s gospel tells us that they too, end up believing.

This is a familiar story- probably because it is one of a handful of stories about Jesus interacting with a woman and probably because of the tabloid nature of a story about a woman that had five husbands and was living with another man who wasn’t even her husband. That makes someone like Kim Kardashian look like back page news.

Most often when we have heard this story we hear that it means that Jesus is for the oppressed. We know it to mean that God loves everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, or sin and no doubt about it- all that is true.
But perhaps what is extraordinary about this story is not that Jesus loves even this woman, BUT that this woman ends up loving Jesus.

Most of us spend a lot of our lives hiding our sins. We cover up. We pretend. We try to bury. We do everything we can to distract ourselves and to forget the things we have done and the things we have left undone that have separated us from God. Here in a simple interaction between Jesus and a woman at a well- we see what it truly looks like to come into contact with the living and loving God.

Priest and theologian, NT Wright tells the story of the reaction a friend of his received when he went home as a young teenager, and announced to his mother that he’d become a Christian. Alarmed, and not a Christian herself, she thought he had joined some kind of cult. “They’ve brainwashed you!” she said. He replied, ‘Mom, if you had seen what was in my brain- you would realize it was in need of washing!”

It is so interesting to me that when the woman at the well is called out and left standing with her sin out in the open- her response is not to run and hide but instead she stays, she takes a drink of the living water, and then she stops hiding once and for all and goes to share that water with anyone and everyone she can find.
She doesn’t have all the doctrine correct. She doesn’t know exactly how God does it- but she does know that for the first time in her life- she isn’t thirsty anymore. She is tired of living in hiding. She is tired of muddling through- and when faced with the living Christ- she allows herself to be changed.

Faith in Christ is not about what we know- it is instead about who we know. It is about having an encounter with the living God that offers living water to each and every one of us through the power of his Holy Spirit- and faith is about letting that water change us.

Years ago I had a friend in college who proclaimed that she was an atheist. She had never gone to church, she had studied philosophy, she was bright, talented and she decided that there was no way God could be real. Throughout college she would sarcastically say things around me like “you better not swear, Danielle’s around and God doesn’t like that.” Or she would be telling stories about what she had done the night before and she would say “Danielle, cover your ears.” I had seasons in college when I was a bit of a zealot- and I would think to myself “what can I do to save her?” I would talk with my Bible study leader and say, “if she just knew the facts about who Jesus was and what he did- maybe she would believe.”

A few years after college- this friend of mine moved to the southwest and a few of our friends who were living up north went to visit her- in the middle of february. We were headed out to sight see one day and I was struck by the incredible beauty of the Arizona landscape. I had come from the frozen tundra in the middle of February- to the dessert that was bursting with warmth and new life and I was struck with everything from the smells to the colors, to the look of the sky and the way the sun was shinning- not to mention the fact that real flowers were actually alive- outside- this time of year!

Right as I was thinking all those things- my friend turned to me and said out of the blue “Danielle, why do you believe in Jesus?” We hadn’t talked about this for years. I remember thinking this was my moment- I had always wanted her to ask me this questions- would i tell her all the Bible stories I knew? Would I recite the facts about the reliability of scripture?
What I said to her was the first things that came to mind: “I believe in Jesus because he has made a difference in my life. I told her that I can’t explain it but God has changed me. And then I told her I believe when I see creation around me- the flowers, and sunsets, and mountains that remind me that all this was created by God and that I was created as well.

That was the end of that conversation. No more questions followed- we simply went back to catching up as old college friends. When push came to shove, and I was asked the question I had been waiting for, I didn’t share my knowledge about Jesus with her- I shared what was on my heart.

That is what the woman at the well did as well. She didn’t go off to the dessert to be alone with God. She didn’t go to as many Bible studies as she could to learn all there was to be learned about God. She simply went, to her people and told her story. She knew God had changed her- and she invited others to see the one who made a difference in her life- to see if he could also make a difference in theirs.

A woman, who no one had listened to before was finally being heard- not because of who she was- but because of who she knew- the true and living God.

And so today, I ask you, are you thirsty? Have you come in contact with living God in a way that has quenched your thirst for what is true, real, and meaningful in life? If the answer is no, find someone to lead you to the water. Find someone, to tell you their story of why they believe in Jesus and why it has made a difference in their life. Those people are here you know.

If the answer is yes- if you can genuinely say “yes Jesus has quenched my thirst”- then there is simply one thing you need to do: tell someone. You don’t have to be a pastor, missionary, evangelist or even politically correct to share your faith- all you have to do is share your story. Because your story is the most powerful story you know. Most of us haven’t had five husbands, but we HAVE had real, life changing and heart shaping interactions with the living God who offered us living water and after we drank it- we were never the same.

A few years after my visit to the dessert to see my college friend she called me- out of the blue. We had lost touch but she had something she wanted to tell me. Her co-worker had invited her to an Alpha class and my friend had gone and she accepted Jesus Christ. She just wanted me to know.

To this day, I have no idea if my simple explanation of why I believe in Jesus made a difference in my friend’s life and faith. But I do know- that it was my story and I am the only one who can tell it. My story is what God has given me- and it is mine to give away. Your story- is yours- and you are the only one who can tell it.

As Jesus said to the disciples two thousand years ago-the harvest is ripe. It was ripe then- when the woman at the well began to harvest, and it is ripe today. People are thirsty. They are dying of thirst all around us and waiting to be led to the living water.

I wonder who is going to help them find that water?

Amen.

John 7:33-52

by Daniel Harrell

The Defense Department employs a group of analysts who specialize in scrutinizing religious language and behavior in order to authenticate terrorist communications. These Arabic and Islamic theology scholars recently recognized language in one terrorist screed to be subtly derived from the philosophy of a late 13^th century Syrian religious leader who declared jihad on fellow Muslims. This Syrian philosophy is the sort of thing Muslim insurgents might read to justify their own attacks on fellow Muslims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan or now in Syria itself. This helpful ability to understand ancient doctrine and its current implications has been labeled “forensic theology.” It’s been used to pinpoint groups or individuals who pose the greatest threats to national security.

In a way the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were forensic theologians. Experts in Hebrew theology and Mosaic law, they specialized in scrutinizing religious language and behavior. Not only did they adjudicate authentic conformity to the Law, they pinpointed those individuals and groups who posed the greatest threats to Israel’s national security. To them, Jesus was especially dangerous. His sacrilegious speech and rabble rousing warranted arrest. So they sent the Temple police out to pick him up. Yet Jesus cagily eluded their grasp—without actually going anywhere. He said: “I will be with you a little while longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will search for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.” The Jewish leaders could only scratch their heads.

If you’ve done much reading in John’s gospel, you know it to be loaded with irony. Here the Jewish leaders wondered where Jesus thinks he’s going that they would be unable to find him. They mockingly surmised about his going to teach Gentiles, an absurd notion for any rabbi claiming to be sent from Israel’s God. Jews don’t talk to Gentiles. But ironically the gospel did extend to Gentiles who embraced it in ways most Jews refused. Jesus also declared that his time was short. This would have been welcome news to the Pharisees who were so eager to be rid of him that they plotted his death. But killing Jesus only spelled their own demise. After rising from the dead and sending His Spirit, Jesus became more vitally and universally present than he ever was while walking the earth.

The Pharisee Nicodemus (of John 3:16 fame) shows up to ask whether legally they could judge Jesus without a hearing. Again irony is at work: Those who demanded strict adherence to the law were not themselves obeying it. The rest of the Pharisees cut Nicodemus off and accused him of “campaigning for that Galilean.” “Examine the evidence,” they demanded, “See if any prophet ever comes from Galilee!” But, of course Jesus was not from Galilee, as anybody’s who’s ever read the Christmas story knows. Not that the pretentious Pharisees would taken the time to check—they were so sure they were right.

I was out in Boston this week for a faith-science discussion that met at the Harvard Faculty Club. I have so say that Harvard does pretentiousness better than anybody. I miss it. Anyway, on my way back I stopped off in the Logan airport Men’s Room. A woman came barreling in behind me, her bags confidently slung on her shoulder. She looked at me and gave me this sly grin, then condescendingly asked, “Still having trouble telling an M from a W?” Naturally there was no need for me to respond. I only had to wait. 3, 2, 1… I’m so sure that the entire terminal heard her scream. Certainty can be a dangerous thing.

The commoners who heard Jesus speak were not so sure—though they all agreed Jesus was somebody special. Some hoped he might be the Moses-like-Prophet-to-come promised by God in Deuteronomy. Others hoped he was the King David-like-Messiah-to-come promised by Isaiah and Micah and others who would restore Israel’s political and national fortunes. Even the Temple police were inspired. “Never has anyone spoken like this!” they said. The forensic theologians berated them for coming back empty handed.  The temple police acted as naïve as the ignorant, unenlightened rabble whom Jesus also hoodwinked. Only fools believe. Which ironically, is also true. As the apostle Paul wrote, a former Pharisee himself, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”

The context for all of this was the Jewish thanksgiving-like Feast of Tabernacles; so named for the tents or “tabernacles” built to commemorate ancient Israel’s trek across the desert on their way to the Promised Land. Jews, then as now, camp out in temporary shelters to remind themselves of God’s promise of a permanent housing in the face of fleeting earthly life. I remember an observant Jewish neighbor of mine in the city who would pitch her tent in the middle of a parking lot, abandoning the comfort of her condo in good Tabernacles tradition. Later I watched as a suburban gentleman erected a tabernacle on his back deck; only his opened up into a posh living room. I couldn’t help but feel that he was cheapening the intent of Tabernacles. I also couldn’t help but mention this out loud in his presence—in a joking way naturally. Knowing that I was a Christian, he came back at me with four simple words: “plastic blinking nativity scenes.” Good point.

Of course the main point of Tabernacles was not to remember Israel’s time in the desert (they didn’t spend forty years wandering around as a reward for good behavior). The main point of Tabernacles was to remind how in time God will usher his people into a new heaven and a new earth where He will abide with them forever. On second thought, maybe that tent on the deck did ­prove more apropos; inasmuch as it was connected to something better. Tabernacles envisions that day when all of our temporary, shabby shelters will be shed; a day when redeemed creation will thrive in sync with heaven.

Tabernacles coincided with the grape and olive harvests and included rituals geared to promote harvest success. Prayers for needed rain were prayed in grand liturgical fashion. On seven days of the eight day festival, and seven times on the seventh day, a priest would carry a golden flagon down to the pool of Siloam (where legend held that angels stirred the water). Then with a flagon full of water, the priest would lead a pomp-laden parade back up to the Temple complete with singing, palm-waving and trumpets. When the priest reached the altar, he’d circle it seven times and pour out the water as a sacramental entreaty.

Needless to say, these prayers inferred more than plain rain. As we have seen over and over this fall, water is more than water in the Bible. At Creation, water was the chaos over which God’s spirit spoke light and life into being. With Noah’s flood and the Red Sea, water was God’s justice against evil. In the desert, the water Moses drew from a rock proved God to be faithful even when his people weren’t. Ezekiel’s miracle river of life pouring out from the Temple into the Dead Sea forecast God’s redemption of all things. Here at the Feast of Tabernacles, water poured out in the Temple stirred memories of God’s faithfulness in those original tabernacle years which stirred hope for the future. “On that day,” Zechariah declares, “living water will flow out from Jerusalem…The LORD will be king over the whole earth. All nations … will go up to worship the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.”

Imagine the energy and excitement this feast inspired; especially for people currently oppressed under Roman occupation. If but for a moment, their minds were free to dream of that day when their suffering would be washed away, their storehouses filled, their joy complete and all their prayers answered. Picture being in the midst of all of this intense expectation, enraptured by the celebration, filled with passionate longing for God’s salvation. Add the promise of a new Moses who single-handedly saved an enslaved people from tyranny. Mix in an ardent thirst for a King David-like warrior in whose presence all nations would cower. Whip all of this up to a fervent pitch—only to have some homeless, working-class, dingy ex-carpenter stand up and shout: “It’s me! I’m the one you’ve been hoping for!”

Seriously. That’d be like somebody who’d prayed her whole life for prince charming, who’d packed a hope chest full of baby clothes, who’d for years wistfully waited for Mr. Right to appear, only to reach her Quarter Life crisis and have some homely, good for nothing Mama’s boy waltz up and announce, “Hi honey, I’m home. Your prayers are answered.”

But what if it turned out to be true? Wouldn’t that be ironic?

In good Gospel of John fashion, on the last and climatic day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said (referring to the Old Testament), ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Jesus proclaimed himself to be Ezekiel’s river of life. He is the Exodus Rock from which water gushed for the parched. He is the Temple in whom God fully resides. Jesus embodied all of God’s great deeds of the past and his great promises for the future. He is the body of water poured out, who gives life to all who are thirsty, to any who will come to him and drink.

There is no life without water. Water participates in a incredible array of processes every minute of every day—you need it to make soup and clean computer chips, it drives the weather and shapes the face of the earth. The human body is more than 60 percent water; it holds our body temperatures at 98.6 degrees. Your body’s water-balance mechanisms are tuned with the precision of a digital chemistry lab, which is a bit of bad news.
You not only don’t need to drink eight glasses of water every day, you cannot in any way make your complexion more youthful by drinking water. As author Charles Fishman writes, you cannot possibly “hydrate” your skin from the inside by drinking an extra bottle or two of Perrier. All that does is make you have to go more—albeit it in French.

Clearly this is not what Jesus meant by rivers of living water flowing from inside you. His water flows from your heart—which John tells us has to do with the Holy Spirit. It’s a throwback to that John 3:16 conversation with Nicodemus where Jesus said no one can enter the kingdom of God without being reborn of water and spirit. Water and spirit go together at new creation just like they did at creation—just as they did at Jesus’ baptism, just like they do at our own baptisms. However “entering the kingdom of God” is not solely about securing a reservation for the Pearly Gates. Like in the rest of the Bible, genuine thirst-quenching faith reaps well-watered fruit of that faith. Not only will we drink in the Spirit of Jesus, but the spirit will pour out of us too.

What does it look like to have a river of life flowing out of your heart? No doubt it looks like love and joy and peace, patience and gentleness—virtues understood to be fruits of the Spirit. But I wonder if Jesus has another virtue in mind—especially given the contentiousness his Tabernacles declaration incited. To enter the Kingdom of God was to reject the kingdoms of the world. To declare yourself the fulfillment of Scripture, unless it was true, would be tantamount to blasphemy. It takes a lot of guts to say all of that. It takes a lot of guts to believe in somebody who says all of that. I mention it because the word Jesus uses to describe the source of living water in us is actually not the heart, but the belly. As the King James has Jesus saying it, “whoever believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”

Of course we can appreciate why Bibles go with heart instead of belly. “Heart” does work as a synonym since the Greek word itself is about motivation rather than anatomy. In ancient culture the seat of one’s motivations was often the stomach, but in our culture, to talk about anything flowing out of your belly can come off as a bit too, well, intestinal. And yet I wonder if the word heart has suffered from overuse—like when people say, “I mean it from the bottom of my heart.” To be frank, “I mean it from the bottom of my heart” is probably the last thing anybody would ever say who really does mean something from the bottom of his heart.

Unfortunately, Christians who say they follow Jesus with “all of their heart” are often those same Christians who when confronted by that hard line Jesus draws between money and God, will say, “You don’t seriously have to sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, just need to have a right attitude toward them. Jesus said we’d always have the poor with us.” Or when confronted by that hard line Jesus gives about loving your enemies, will insist that Jesus only said pray for them, he didn’t say speak to them ever again.

Maybe that river of life needs to flow out of our bellies. Out of our gut. It does take courage to truly follow Jesus. It takes guts to be honest about your faith, guts to endure ostracism from the skeptic and the socially careless, guts to speak honestly against injustice and cruelty when you’d rather keep quiet and not draw attention; it takes guts to renounce materialism and free up your resources for the poor, guts to bypass lucrative, personal fame in order to serve other people, guts to serve without being thanked for it. It takes guts to forgive those who’ve wronged you, guts to confess your sin to those you’ve wronged, guts to work on your marriage, to hold your tongue from gossip, to press on when troubles make God seem distant, it takes guts, it takes courage, to seriously take up a cross and follow Jesus with all of your heart.

British author and Christian GK Chesterton described it, ironically, like this: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice … [Christians] seek life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; we desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” Indeed. The water of life is ultimately wine of resurrection. It’s always served in a cross-shaped cup.

Mark 1:9-13

by Daniel Harrell

Our survey of water in the Bible this fall has finally landed us on the most important water event of them all: the baptism of Jesus. It’s distinct from the other water events we’ve looked at thus far, because baptism is actually one we get to dive into ourselves. Along with communion which we celebrate this morning, baptism is a central practice of our faith; it is our initiation into Christian community. Though unlike communion, baptism is a once in a lifetime experience. Baptism comes with gallons of theological significance, most of which we tend to take for granted. As Congregationalists living in Luther-land where infant baptism is the norm, most of us can’t even remember our own baptisms. The baptisms of children, while beautiful, are still treated more as ceremonial than momentous. Maybe that’s because there’s no heaven tearing open or thunderous voice booming at our baptisms—no spirit descending like a dove. Or maybe it’s because we use water instead of fire. We do take water for granted. As recently as 1955, rural Americans without running water in their homes used ten gallons a day per person to live (as compared to cows which used twenty gallons per day per cow). Today, with running water, a normal American uses a hundred gallons, and much of that, twenty gallons a day, is just for flushing the toilet.

Whenever a family brings their baby to be baptized, their major concern is not what baptism signifies, as much as whether their baby will cry. Parents go to great lengths to guard against this: plugging his mouth with a pacifier, sedating her with milk and rocking her into a sacramental stupor. Most of the times this works, but when it doesn’t, the ensuing shriek of terror at the unexpected splash can be enough to set an entire congregation on edge. It’s definitely enough to embarrass some parents into never returning to church again.

But I say let those babies scream! Screaming babies are onto something about baptism that most of us forget. More than a bath, baptism is a drowning. It’s is not so much about having your sinful self washed clean as it is about having your sinful self killed off. Jesus called his cross a baptism and the apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, asserted that to be baptized is to be crucified and buried with Christ, so that with Christ, you might be raised from the dead into newness of life.

Early Christians were very serious about their baptisms. According to the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, a presbyter and bishop in third century Rome, getting baptized required much more than professing faith and getting wet. You first underwent a severe examination of intent, which included being grilled as to the nature of your occupation. For instance, you could not join the church if you were a pimp (for obvious reasons), a sculptor or a painter (unless you swore never to create idols), a politician (again, for obvious reasons), someone who teaches children worldly knowledge, a gladiator, an actor, a soldier, an astrologer or anyone who, according to Hippolytus, “does that which may not be mentioned.”

Once your vocation passed theological muster, you’d be allowed to hear the gospel, followed by a three-year period of instruction during which you were expected to lead a virtuous life. At the end of this period, should you prove worthy, you underwent daily exorcisms to ensure purity and cleanliness from any evil spirit, leading up to a three-day fast on the Thursday before Easter. The night before Easter was spent in prayerful vigil. On Easter morning, as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon, you were led naked into the baptismal water (typically held in a pool shaped like a coffin and always filled with cold water) where you would confess your faith and be pushed underneath. You would be held down long enough to “feel the death” after which you would emerge gasping for the air of new life. A fresh, official Christian, you were then clothed with a new white garment, anointed with oil and escorted into to the midst of the congregation where the bishop would bless you and offer you for the first time the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. Some of this we saw last week at Confirmation, which was tied more directly to baptism early on.

How does this apply to babies? Depending on your view of original sin, Christians haven’t always held that babies get a free pass. Sin has a sinister power all its own. On the other hand, infant baptism serves as the New Testament successor to Old Testament circumcision—expanded to include female and Gentile children. Baptism, like circumcision, is the signature of a community’s pledge to raise a child to be faithful to God. And because baptism is done with water that can drown you (just as circumcision was with a knife that can kill you), it’s a pledge made under the penalty of death. Jesus himself said that whoever causes a child to fall into sin would be better off having a millstone tied around his neck and thrown into the sea. So yeah, there should be crying at baptisms.

Mark’s version of Jesus’ baptism has an definite Old Testament look and feel. He starts his gospel with a citation from Isaiah that points to John the Baptist as “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.” John’s own fashion statement—his camel’s hair clothing and leather belt, not to mention his diet of locusts and honey—brought to mind the great prophet Elijah who dressed and ate the same way. God’s last words in the Old Testament promised that Elijah would return “before the great and terrible day of the LORD.” Though he looked like Elijah, John sounded a lot like Jeremiah, warning of God’s justice and calling the people a brood of vipers. His baptizing paralleled a Jewish practice called “proselyte baptism” whereby an idol-loving Gentile pagan converting to Judaism first had to have his idol-loving paganism ceremonially rinsed off. Only here John baptizes chosen people instead of Gentiles, implying that the descendents of Abraham were no better than anybody else. They were sinners too.

In addition to the Old Testament language, Mark paints an Old Testament picture too. Here’s a rendition of Jesus’ baptism from the nineteenth century printmaker Currier and Ives, better known for nostalgic images associated with the holidays. Looking at this print, you’ll notice elements of all the water events we’ve gone over this fall. Let’s do a little review. In Genesis and the creation account, you’ll recall that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” but already present was water over which swept a wind, or spirit, from God. In ancient creation myths, water was feared as the abode of chaos and evil. God the Father redeems peace and beauty out of the chaos and evil for the sake of creation; just as God the Son redeems life and righteousness out of death and sin for the sake of new creation.

Throw an ark in the water and you’re reminded of Noah, the floodwaters serving the sentence of God’s justice, the due consequence of taking God’s grace for granted. The New Testament writers all understood the flood to prefigure the baptismal waters. Later prophets, like Jeremiah, in whose stead John the Baptist follows, cautioned the people again. But because they insisted on doing God wrong, disasters came and practically wiped them out. But God’s anger against their sin and infidelity never rained down for the sake of destruction alone. His fury refines for the sake of redemption. Peter referred to Noah’s flood as water that destroyed the world in order to save it; the same water, he wrote, that now saves us. St. Augustine understood the wooden ark to foreshadow the wooden cross. God saves us through the waters of his justice by the cross of Jesus, which is our ark of grace. A dove gave the all clear sign to Noah, showing it was safe to disembark. At Jesus’ baptism, the dove signals that in Christ everybody’s safe.

Now there is no floating ax head at Jesus’ baptism, if you remember that sermon from 2 Kings. But there are parallels between Jesus and Elisha. The Bible refers to Elisha as not just any man, but as the man of God. Floating iron verified Elisha’s true identity. Elisha means “God is salvation,” and through Elisha God saved his people from a whole host of self-inflicted disasters. Jesus also means “God saves,” and through Christ God saves us too. Elijah anointed Elisha with a double portion of his spirit. John the Baptist—the New Testament Elijah—did the same for Jesus, anointing him with the fullness of the Holy Spirit and verified Jesus’ true identity. Elisha was the Man of God, Jesus is the beloved Son of God with whom the Father was well pleased.

Baptism’s ultimate trajectory is new life in God’s presence. In Ezekiel, which we looked at last Sunday, God’s presence was symbolized by a glorious new Temple out of which flowed a miracle river symbolizing new life. The Temple and the river turn out to be previews of heaven. The river shows up in the book of Revelation as the river of life, but by then it’s clear that the Temple is no longer a building but “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” himself. God becomes so present to us that buildings are no longer necessary. His people are his dwelling place.

Jesus goes through the water of baptism and is confirmed to be God’s beloved son. He is anointed with the Spirit of power. He will make way a path to new life. But the first order of business for the Spirit is to lead Jesus into the desert to be tempted by Satan. So much for being God’s beloved Son. At our Wednesday night sermon group, someone pulled out that verse from Hebrews that reminds how Jesus needed to be temped like us in order to sympathize with us, and that he “learned obedience from what he suffered so that once made perfect, he could become the source of eternal salvation.” What? Was Jesus not perfect already? What did have to learn? It turns out that while the word “obedience” derives from the Hebrew verb “to hear,” it always comes tied to the verb “to do.” Jesus knew that obedience to God was a whole body proposition, but he didn’t learn it until he did it.

This holds true for us too. Bob from our Wednesday night group told us about the birth of his daughter and how there were problems with her heart. She was rushed to the NICU where a chaplain soon showed up and asked if he’d like to have his daughter baptized. Far from a ceremonial gesture, this was every parent’s nightmare. Bob knew he believed in Jesus, but did he have faith enough to trust Jesus with his daughter? He didn’t learn it until he did it. Baptism demands all that we are. Bob gave his daughter to God. And God gave her back. This past Wednesday she started Confirmation.

Jesus went through the waters of God’s justice and into the desert of temptation just as Israel did with Moses. God saved his people and did his justice to Pharaoh’s army. God blessed his people with his spirit, who accompanied them day and night. And that led Israel into the desert where they had a chance to learn obedience too. And yet they failed over and over again. But where they failed, Jesus succeeded and became “the perfect source of eternal salvation” for all who follow him. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Our ancestors all passed through the sea, and were baptized in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.”

If you remember that sermon from Exodus, you’ll remember that though God led his people out into the desert to test them, they ended up testing him. They people ran out of water and complained to God, though the word used for complain was more like the verb to sue. It meant “to legally challenging somebody’s authority.” The people sued the Lord over their water rights! Moses responded, “Why do you test the Lord?” He then turned to God and asked, “What am I supposed to do?” What came next was truly remarkable. The Lord let his people take him to court. A rock served as the courtroom dock where the defendant stands. Moses staff was the executioner. And then God said to Moses, “I will be standing on the rock. I will be the defendant. Smite the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” So Moses’ smote the rock, in effect condemning God, and sprung forth water for the people. The Almighty Lord, Yahweh himself, pled guilty!

This is how Paul interpreted the rock in the desert as Christ. It was another foreshadow of the cross. In John’s gospel, as Jesus hung on the cross, a soldier pierced his side with a spear and water came out. The cross smote Christ, condemned God, and sprung forth living water for all people. As Paul would later explain, “God made him who knew no sin to be our sin, so that in him we might gain his righteousness.”

To be baptized into Christ makes his cross your cross. “To be baptized into Christ Jesus is to be baptized into his death.” But to be baptized into Christ’s death also makes his resurrection your resurrection. His life is now your life. So much so that God’s words to Jesus now apply to you: “You are my Son. You are my daughter. My beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Ezekiel 47:1-12

by Daniel Harrell

It’s good to see everybody in church today. I was concerned folks might not be back after last Sunday’s water sermon from Jeremiah—we’ve been focusing on water in the Bible all fall. Granted, last Sunday was about a lack of water, a drought brought on by God himself in response to Israel’s unfaithfulness. Bad enough that God held back the rain. Worse that God held back from helping his people. He refused to answer their prayers due to their hardheartedness. But today is Reformation Sunday, so let’s reboot. Turn the page. Pick a different prophet. Make a change. This is what God does. No, the Lord doesn’t himself change—the God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament. What God changes is his people. By the end of Jeremiah, and here in Ezekiel, the Lord gives them a new heart and a capacity for relationship—a new covenant not written in stone, but written inside their souls. Jesus speaks to this new covenant over the communion table—a covenant made possible by his own blood shed. In Christ, God “forgives our iniquity and remembers our sin no more.” Grace marks a new beginning, it is a reformation.

The Protestant Reformers stressed grace alone as the means of new birth. Salvation is all God’s doing. You can never do anything to earn it. And yet you still must do something to show you’ve received it. Jesus said that you can only tell a tree by its fruit. The apostle Paul said you have to run the race to win it. So run with perseverance, the Bible says, and fix your eyes on Jesus who not only makes sure that you run well, but that you always win.

Jesus describes a day when those racers having loved their neighbors, served the poor, told the truth and worked for justice are confirmed as “good and faithful.” Dressed in white and anointed with the oil of victory, Jesus says to them, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your prize, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” Call it Judgment Day, the Second Coming or the Finish Line, Christians have always affirmed, as we did today, that Jesus will return to do justice, reward the righteous and set the world right forever. It’s a hope that shows up in the Old Testament too. It’s the ultimate outcome of Jeremiah’s new covenant, a vivid watercolor painted here in the prophet Ezekiel.

Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah prophesied concerning Israel’s captivity to the Babylonians—a savage nation devoted to slaughter and conquest. God would have saved Israel from Babylon had they stayed faithful. He’d chosen Israel of all nations to be his beloved, had moved into their neighborhood and blessed off their sandals with prime real estate, national defense and guaranteed retirement. Yet despite being graced by God’s presence—symbolized by this magnificent Temple in which resided God’s glory—the Israelites behaved as if they were entitled to it. Like the prodigal son they took advantage of their father’s goodness and did as they pleased—browbeating the poor, defrauding their neighbor and engaging in an immorality so vile that even the surrounding pagan nations were appalled.

Unlike the parable of the Prodigal Son, here in Ezekiel, it’s the father who took off. Just as God’s presence had been a sign of His favor, his departure became a sign of His judgment. In response to his people’s shameless behavior, God packed his bags and declared lights out for the Temple, Jerusalem and the nation. He left in a glory-filled fury, abandoning Israel to its destruction. God’s exit cleared the way for Babylon to wipe them out.

But now, here in Ezekiel’s fourth and final vision, the father returns. God comes back. His judgment had been for the sake of their salvation. The Lord flips the lights back on so that “the glory of the Lord filled the house.” It’s a house, a new Temple, for which Ezekiel provides eight long, detailed, even tedious, chapters of plans. While God’s return was wonderful and exciting, reading through these house plans can be brutal: “The building whose door faced north was a hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide. Both in the section twenty cubits from the inner court and in the section opposite the pavement of the outer court, gallery faced gallery at the three levels. In front of the rooms was an inner passageway ten cubits wide and a hundred cubits long.” It makes you want to pick up Leviticus just for fun. If you’ve ever led a Bible study that felt like it was going nowhere but you felt guilty about ending it, pull out Ezekiel and you won’t have to worry about anybody ever coming back.

My Wednesday night sermon small group was concerned. Here in chapter 47, our passage for this morning, the emphasis shifts to the landscaping, and at first glance the tedium is still present: “Going on eastward with a cord in his hand, a man measured one thousand cubits, and the water was ankle-deep. Again he measured one thousand, and the water was knee-deep. Again he measured one thousand, and the water was up to the waist.” This stream of water spilled out from inside God’s new house, as if someone had left the shower running. What started as a trickle got so deep so fast that soon you could swim in it. And suddenly you’re like, wait a minute, any trickle that becomes a river in less than a mile and a half is a miracle trickle. Verdant trees with leaves that never turned brown bore fruit every month along each bank. And all of this lushness blooms in a dead desert near the Dead Sea, barren badlands where trees don’t grow and fresh water don’t flow. God transforms both uninhabitable desert and languid sea into a abundant garden. The Lord raises even the land from the dead.

For a people ravaged by war and exile brought on by their own shameful mutiny; severed from God with no hope of reunion or redemption; such an unexpected and underserved paradise ushered forth hymns of joy sung with tears of relief. Ezekiel paints their salvation with vivid images of abundance: limitless water, boundless fresh produce, medicine for healing, fish and animal life to enjoy. It’s actually sounds a lot like America—enough that I wonder whether Ezekiel’s vision has the power to stir us as it must have stirred our exiled Israelite forebears. Abundance is status quo in our country. Why yearn for Ezekiel’s paradise when you can get fresh fruit even in the winter, medicines at the pharmacy, beautiful scenery on any day at the lake and water no further than the twist of a spigot?

Of course such abundance is not the global status quo—talk to those who’ve recently returned from the Dominican Republic, just off of America’s southern coast. Many political scientists assert that coming world wars won’t be fought over who controls the oil, but over who controls the water. In India, about 170 million people drink water every day that has been carried home by foot, one out of six people in a country of 1 billion. That’s the number of people in the United States who live east of the Mississippi. It’s as if everyone from Maine to Key West, from New York to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta, relied on water that someone had walked to collect every day. In India, their space program made possible the discovery of water on the moon. But even the Indian scientists and engineers who oversaw the project don’t have running water at home. In the twenty-first century, it is estimated that as many as 100 million people worldwide are making the water walk every day, with hundreds of millions depending on water that has been carried, almost always on the head of a woman or girl.

My Wednesday night group was quick to remind me that living here in the land of abundance doesn’t mean you have access to it—especially in these difficult days as joblessness and poverty have intensified. He same was true for Israel. There was plenty of abundance available, but they had no access to it. And it was their own fault. Despite eight chapters of magnificent, if meticulous, plans, Ezekiel’s Temple never got built. Instead, what did get built once the Israelites returned from their Babylonian captivity was a comparably low-rent replacement. Moreover, according to the prophet Haggai (and later Jesus too), this lesser rendition didn’t house God’s glory the same way that the first one did. This was because the people soon started trashing the new Temple as badly as they’d trashed the first. The Lord said in Ezekiel that surely my people “will never again defile my holy name with their detestable practices and their loathsome abominations.” But they did. Divine judgment and near-total annihilation failed to induce any lasting reform. No sooner were they restored to their land than their willful and hypocritical disobedience resumed. Haggai and other prophets pick up denouncing the people where Jeremiah and Ezekiel left off.

Perhaps this is another reason why Ezekiel’s Temple was never built. God knew better than to try and live among people again. He knew that taking up residence in their midst would only lead to their total annihilation. Holiness cannot tolerate infidelity and injustice. So God kept his distance. Just “describe the temple to the people of Israel,” the Lord commanded Ezekiel. He never says build it. “Let them consider its appearance,” God said. He never commands them to purchase stone and lumber. “Just show them the plans,” he said,  “that they may be ashamed of their sins.”

How would a set of plans cause shame? Hope maybe. I had some good friends flooded out by a raging tropical storm in the South. The water rose waist high throughout their subdivision as they slept. Had not their 2-year-old awoke, seen the water rising around his bed and screamed, he probably would have drowned. As it was, they all awoke and scrambled for higher ground, salvaging a few personal belongings but basically losing everything else. Homeless, the four of them were shoe-horned into a small apartment when I stopped by to visit. They recounted the dismal days they’d spent pouring over lost mementos and treasures, lamenting labor now wasted remodeling their house on their limited budget, as well as time spent haggling with insurers and government relief agencies. But just as I was about to conclude that their plight was an inconsolable saga of sadness with no end in sight, they pulled out this long tube of paper and grinned. Giddy, they unrolled the source of their happiness. House plans. Blueprints. “This is going to be our new home,” they said.

Ezekiel’s house plans were Israel’s hope too. But how would God’s plans for a new Temple ever induce shame? As a kid I lived in a house my brickmason dad built himself. I remember the house plans and my brother and me getting to pick out our own room. We got to have real wood paneling and blue shag carpet, a red bean bag chair with peace signs and beads and a lava lamp (it was far out). Six weeks later, my parents were out to dinner and I was asleep in my room. I awoke to smoke encircling around my face. Our house was on fire. I was rescued by a heroic babysitter who yanked me out of my drowsy stupor and, along with my little brother, high-tailed it across the street to our neighbors’ just as the flames burst through the roof. All of my parents’ hard work and dreams literally went up in smoke.

But what made it worse was that it turned out to be my fault. I had mischievously  knocked over this basket of blankets my hard-working mom had folded downstairs. Goofing around, I jumped on them like a trampoline mashing them down into the hot coils of this electric heater. That night, while my parents were out, the blankets caught fire. What the fire didn’t get, the water from the fire truck hoses did. And unfortunately, insurance didn’t cover everything. Some of the damage would remain. My dad and the architect had to draw up a whole new set of plans, salvaging whatever they could for the reconstruction. Seeing that set of plans made me feel horrible. Ashamed. I knew that the replacement house would never be as good as the original. The stains that splotched my Dad’s beautiful stonework fireplace were permanent reminders of the way things weren’t going to be now because of me.

Maybe that’s the kind of shame the Israelites felt when they saw Ezekiel’s plans. That glorious Temple would never be built in their lifetime. The low-rent replacement they’d enter each Sabbath for worship would remind them of the way things weren’t going to be now because of them. In the parable of the prodigal son, it’s desperate shame that turns the ungrateful young boy’s life around. He’s no longer fit to be called his father’s son anymore—he returns to his father and asks to be treated like a slave. But his father would have none of it. Overjoyed that his son is alive, the father puts a white robe on his shoulders and lays out a spread fit for a prize-winning athlete. The hard love that beckoned the prodigal son to feel shame was the same love that brought him back, and presumably the same love that brought about some change in his life. We can do nothing to earn God’s grace, but we still must do something to show we’ve received it. Grace will change you. I don’t play with blankets anymore. And I’m still really careful when it comes to electric heaters. But that’s not why my parents let me live in their rebuilt house. They let me stay because they love me and they were overjoyed that I was alive.

The house my Dad rebuilt was never as good as the original—but it also wasn’t the last house. Many years later, they built another one out in the country among the Carolina pines. It overlooked a river where the fishing is good, as well as the verdant green of a beautiful golf course where the trees never turn brown. The sun sparkles every morning and it’s quiet and peaceful and better than that first dream house ever was. And I got to live there too. Ezekiel’s house plans are a preview of heaven, a final house being built not with lumber and stones, but with you and me as living stones, made righteous by Christ. Turn to last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation and there you find “the river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb,” and “the tree of life producing its fruit every month; and leaves for the healing of the nations.” There’s “no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be our light, and we will reign forever and ever,” overjoyed that everybody’s alive and that everybody’s home.

Jeremiah 14:1-9

by Daniel Harrell

We’ve been on something of a trajectory so far in our water sermon series this fall. We began with the waters of creation—all of the water that will ever will exist was present at the beginning. Thanks to the hydrologic cycle of evaporation, condensation and precipitation, the same water you drank and washed with this morning was the same water that rained on Noah’s Ark. It’s the same water that parted and then collapsed on Pharaoh’s chariots in the Red Sea, the same water that Moses drew from a rock in the desert to drink, the same on which Elisha compelled an iron ax head to float. We’ve moved from total water to flooding water to drowning water to drinking water to floating water, only to arrive this morning at no water. Minnesota does need rain, but the drought experienced here in Jeremiah 14 is more akin to the one that currently cripples the Horn of Africa where tens of thousands have died. Theoretically the Earth has more than enough water for everybody—humans only use about 10 percent of the planet’s available freshwater supply for all of our needs. The problem is distribution. The main reason is weather. Water’s abundance or scarcity is intensely weather and climate dependent.

Here in Jeremiah the main reason is God. He’s angry with his people and therefore takes away their water. They’ve broken covenant and they know it and they know how to fix it. Written as a psalm of lament, this morning’s passage includes a  clear confession of guilt: “Our iniquities testify against us, … our apostasies indeed are many, and we have sinned against you.” Repentance brings forgiveness. We read later in chapter 29 the Lord’s hopeful promise that his people can “seek me and find me when they seek me with all their heart.” Only here their heart doesn’t really seem to be into it. It’s like they’re just mouthing the words; going through the motions. Isn’t that enough? At least they said the words. Besides, God always responded to their cries for help. Always forgave. Always loves. He has a reputation to protect. What kind of Savior could let his chosen people suffer and still be a Savior? “Why are you acting like a stranger,” they pray, sounding rather snarky, “are you a tourist just passing through? Are you confused? A mighty warrior who doesn’t know what to do?” It’s a odd way to pray when you’ve run out of water, helpless and dying of thirst. Any contrition has given way to bad-mouthing the Lord.

Jeremiah appeared during a particularly perilous time in Israel’s history. Despite getting to witness God’s mighty deeds and words firsthand, God’s people opted to place their trust in idols instead, the handcrafted deities of their enemies that weren’t nearly as demanding as the Lord. Freed of needing to please God, they generally broke every commandment in the book. Jeremiah tried to warn them. Never the most tactful of prophets, he relentlessly railed against their treachery and infidelity. He likened them to camels in heat and to lustful wild donkeys in their pursuit of pleasure. He told them their destiny was a valley of slaughter where their carcasses would become food for dogs.

Author Kathleen Norris, in her popular book The Cloister Walk, described spending a year in a Benedictine monastery where Jeremiah was read to start each day. “Listening to Jeremiah is one heck of a way to get your blood going in the morning,” she wrote, “It puts caffeine to shame.” She noted that the Benedictine monks weren’t used to being compared to camels in heat either, but that they took it pretty well. Raised eyebrows were followed by a kind of quiet assent, as if they were thinking: well, there are days.

For the people of Judah it was every day. What’s a prophet to do? Or say, a chaplain for that matter. Navy rear admiral Barry Black is chaplain to the United States Senate where every working session has opened with prayer since 1789. Black recently opened a session by praying for the Lord to infuse Senators “with a spirit of reconciliation that will break down divisive walls, bringing harmony and cooperation. To “give them a spirit of unity and the wisdom to have respect, one for the other.” To “enable the members of this body to experience your presence, and to receive your wisdom. May they receive these blessings—aware of your counsel that to whom much is given, much is required.” We all know how well these prayers have worked lately. No sooner does Chaplain Black intone an “Amen,” than his flock launches into its acrimonious bleating, denouncing one another as “enemies of progress, abusers of the public trust, and raw sewage in the great river of American ideas.” That the rancor persists during these dire economic times disgusts many American citizens, leading to historically high disapproval ratings of somewhere around 82%. But that doesn’t seem to matter. The article I read about Chaplain Black suggested that chaplains mostly serve as the Senate’s equivalent of a piece of parsley—mainly there for the decoration.

Granted, Senators can reap what they sow—usually in the bitter fruit of electoral defeat. Arlen Specter, the longest serving Senator in Pennsylvania history, went down to such defeat in 2010, in a primary no less. Among the various reasons may have included a passing comment he made about drinking water. Senator Specter surprisingly said, “I don’t trust tap water—if I have an opportunity to have bottled water. … I’ve supported legislation to help communities have clean drinking water. But I think there is a natural inclination for people to want to be a little extra-sure on their water. Where I can have access to bottled water, I’m going to use it.” Really? A twenty year Senate veteran with stints on judiciary and appropriations, as well as on the environment and public works committees, and he didn’t know that the United States has among the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world? American tap water system is responsible in part for extraordinary leaps in life expectancy over the last hundred years. Let’s debunk a myth: Bottled water isn’t regulated with anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. If you want to run the risk of something funky in your water, drink it out of a commercially packaged plastic bottle instead of your tap.

For a United States Senator to say he didn’t trust tap water as safe to drink is outrageous. It’s as outrageous as the people of Judah suggesting that God was incompetent to quench their thirst. Jeremiah lambasted them over and over for losing trust in the Lord, but he had become a parsley prophet. So useless were his prayers for the people, that the Lord told him not to even bother anymore. He wasn’t going to answer anyway. The verses that follow this morning’s psalm of lament contain God’s troubling reply. They’re verses I chose not to have read out of respect for the Scripture readers. Even now I can feel my Wednesday night sermon group trying to wave me off. They know what’s coming.

It’s not just that God refused to answer his people’s prayers. It’s worse than that. Thus says the Lord: “Even if they fast, I will not hear their cries for help. If they give offerings I will not accept them. Instead, I will devour them through wars, famines, and plagues.” Drought’s not sufficient. The Lord will not be mocked. Israel cannot endlessly violate Yahweh and then expect mercy to be automatic. Let’s debunk another myth: Grace has its boundaries. God’s people want to chase after other gods and do as they please? Go for it. The Lord will let his people suffer the hazardous outcomes of their choices. He’ll surrender them to their enemies. The fierce Babylonians, a savage nation devoted to slaughter and conquest, would mow Judah down and cast its inhabitants into exile.

This is why Christians stay away from the Old Testament. Seriously. Take Leviticus, for instance. A man gets in a fight and in the heat of the scuffle, lets loose a cussword with God’s name in it (a violation of the third commandment). Immediately the foul-mouthed man is hauled off to Moses for blaspheming the Lord’s name. Moses waits for the Lord to pronounce sentence, which the Lord does, saying, “Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. Whoever blasphemes the name of the lord shall be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him.” Why does blasphemy get you stoned? Because the Old Testament places blasphemy and bad-mouthing alongside murder, implying that to curse is to kill. Eye for an eye—and also why you should stick to the New Testament.

Except that when you turn to the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, Jesus makes the same connection between bad-mouthing and murder. He says, “Anyone who angrily insults his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” In Leviticus, curse God and get stoned. In the Sermon on the Mount, curse anybody and burn in hell. I can see you’re really glad you came to church today.

If this is the God of the Bible, you might not want to read your Bible. Better to create your own god, like Israel did: a kinder, gentler deity who is easier to believe and obey. Package him up like bottled water and presume that will make him safer to drink, easier to take. There’s an interesting University of Chicago study that found people’s personal beliefs and moral and social stands mirror those values that they attribute to God. On the one hand this makes sense: one’s values and ethics should be informed by one’s faith. Except that when the researchers tricked subjects into changing their minds about a particular issue or stance, the subjects changed their faith too. They claimed that their new position was also the same as God’s—even if it differed from what they had claimed before. The researchers went on to run MRIs on a few brains and found that subjects’ personal convictions and those they hold about God lit up the same cerebral regions. Their conclusion was that any reliance on a deity to guide one’s decisions and judgments is little more than spiritual sock-puppetry.

Philosophers understood this tendency long before scientists did. The term “anthropomorphism,” whereby human characteristics get ascribed to God, was coined by Xenophanes in the sixth century BC. More recently, philosophers from Rousseau to Voltaire to Mark Twain have all been credited with the line: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”

We prefer to believe that God would never cause disaster to strike, or leave us poor or unhappy; that God would never have anybody suffer, or withhold forgiveness, or allow evil people to triumph—because we would never do these things to ourselves. And then disaster does strike or evil wins or suffering happens, and our hand crafted faith crumbles under the weight of it all because our faith was never in the Lord but in ourselves, in the Jesus we made up in our minds.

This is why we need Jeremiah. He debunks the myths we’ve made up about God. Judah’s made-up faith in a God obliged-to-forgive-and-to-save-no-matter-what allowed them to treat God’s grace with contempt rather than gratitude, as permission to sin rather than as incentive to live righteously—as a sprig of parsley rather than a spring of living water welling up to eternal life. But God would not be mocked. “Thus says the LORD concerning this people: Truly they have loved to stray far from me, they have not restrained their feet; therefore the LORD takes no pleasure them, now he will remember their iniquity and punish their sins.”

My Wednesday night sermon group was quick to cite Jeremiah 29:11, an endearing verse that many have committed to memory: “I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” What about that? I like Jeremiah 29:11 too. But let’s not forget that it follows Jeremiah 29:10- Thus says the Lord, “When seventy years are completed in Babylon, then I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise.” God had plans to prosper his people, but first they had to do their time.

Babylon did invade Jerusalem, destroy the Temple and take Judah captive—all in accordance with the will of God. But that was not the end of the story. The holy fire of God’s fury against sin and infidelity does not burn for the sake of destruction. Unlike its human counterfeits, divine anger refines for the sake of redemption. The devastation that one might interpret as the epilogue to Israel’s existence turned out to be the prologue to their salvation. The unquenchable fire of God’s justice made way for the thirst-quenching relief of God’s mercy. Socially, politically, militarily, individually, the unfaithful Israelites had spiraled beyond the threshold of any human resource for hope or recovery. They were as good as dead. But dead is good as far as God is concerned. It’s only those who lose their lives that ever end up finding them. Read on in Jeremiah 29 and God’s plans to prosper come with that hopeful promise alluded to earlier—one that also echoes in the Sermon on the Mount: “When you seek me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”

So what about my heart? How can I truly seek the Lord if my heart doesn’t really want to? Jeremiah has an answer for that. In chapter 31, the Lord promises a new covenant—a new relationship inscribed not on tablets of stone, but written on our hearts. “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” This is the new covenant of which Jesus speaks over the communion table—a covenant made possible by his own blood shed for our sins. God promises in Jeremiah that it will be an everlasting covenant, never to be withdrawn; “I never to draw back from doing good to them,” he says, making every provision for keeping relationship with us. But at the same time, just in case, God writes something else in us too. Thus says the Lord: “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn away.” This is why we need Jeremiah. Just in case.

[Information on Arlen Spector and bottled water from Charles Fishman, The Big Thirst.

2 Kings 6:1-6

by Daniel Harrell

The latest iPhone update—among the biggest technological splashes in the past ten years—got me thinking about my first cell phone and a different kind of splash. I bought this meatloaf of a Nokia that barely fit in my pocket, but still made me feel pretty cool as I toted it around. I took it with me to the Ryder Cup golf tournament that was in town that weekend, and while out on the course, I eventually needed to step into one of the many port-a-johns that dotted the course. You see where this is headed. Fascinated with my new gadget, I couldn’t help but take it out of my pocket, but because it was hard to hold, and unfamiliar too, it slipped and fell into the tank. If only I’d had Elisha nearby. Suffice to say when I took the phone to be fixed, I had to endure the humiliation of having the technician ask about all the slimy stuff embedded inside. I’ll leave how I was able to get that phone from the tank to a technician to your imagination.

There were no cell phones in Elisha’s day. But as it was the Iron Age, an ax head represented the height of technological advancement. And there it sat, sunk to the bottom of the Jordan River. We return to our look at water in the Bible this week. So far this fall we’ve had water separated at creation, water flooding the earth save for Noah’s Ark, water parted at the hand of Moses, and water coaxed out of a rock in the desert. By comparison, this week’s water episode hardly qualifies as a big large event. Chances are you’ve never read this passage before. Why would you? It is totally random and relatively mundane—some would say upsettingly so—inasmuch as it appears to involve an exploitation of heavenly power for pedestrian purposes. Not that we don’t pray for such power ourselves. Who hasn’t invoked divine assistance to help find a wallet or a pair of glasses or street parking downtown? Jesus said there is much rejoicing in heaven over lost coins, lost sheep and sons that are found, why wouldn’t the same hold for glasses, wallets and parking spots?

Elisha’s disciple must have thought so. Upon losing his ax head, he cried out to the prophet, “Alas master, it was borrowed!” implying how desperately he needed Elisha’s help. Iron was not something you could just run down to the hardware store and replace. Not only were there no hardware stores in the Bible, but unlike copper and bronze which could be molded cold, iron had to be worked hot requiring a great expenditure of fuel for heat. This disciple was probably so poor that he couldn’t have managed a replacement even if he wanted to.

I don’t know how much you know about Elisha. He usually gets overshadowed by his more flamboyant mentor, Elijah, who swooped in out of nowhere to confront the maniacal monarchs of Israel. Elijah ran like the wind, raised the dead, called down fire from heaven against evil, and miraculously parted water like Moses, had face time with God, all before leaving the planet in a chariot of fire. Just prior to Elijah’s fiery departure, Elisha requested a double portion of Elijah’s spirit—the firstborn share of inheritance. Elijah complied and immediately Elisha could do as Elijah did—part water, raise the dead, cure the sick, bless and curse and drive kings crazy. But then we get to this odd, matter-of-fact, lost and found occurrence down by the riverside that operates as if it was inserted as an afterthought. You know, “speaking of Elisha, here’s an interesting story.”

It begins with a space problem. Elisha had a large following of disciples, budding prophets eager to pick up some pointers. The company grew so large that they needed a bigger building. Elisha allowed it, and as the students were chopping wood to build it, the aforementioned ax flew off the handle. This was not unusual. It apparently happened often enough that the Torah had a law concerning it. In Deuteronomy 19 we read: “A man may go into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and as he swings his ax to fell a tree, the head may fly off and hit his neighbor and kill him. If so, that man may flee to a city of refuge and save himself.” Manslaughter by flying ax head was pardonable under the law.

Fortunately no one was killed in this instance, though Elisha’s disciple had to worry about what the ax’s owner might do to him. He begged for help. So Elisha took a piece of wood and threw it near the spot where the ax head sunk—which should call to mind the way we read about Moses throwing a piece of wood into that desert pool of bitter water to make it sweet. Here the sweet thing was seeing that costly piece of ferrite float to the surface. Elisha’s disciple wasn’t expecting that—any more than we would expect water itself to float. Every basic chemistry lesson suggests that since solids are denser than liquids, water as ice should sink in water as liquid. Instead, as water freezes, its molecules create room between each other as they lock into place. The result is a solid less dense than its liquid. If ice didn’t float, rivers, lakes, and even the oceans would freeze—the ice piling up from the bottom in winter, never melting fully in summer—and most aquatic life would die. As it is, the ice layer across the top of lakes and rivers does just the opposite—it acts as a layer of insulation, keeping the rest of the water warmer than it would otherwise be, keeping it liquid, and allowing aquatic life to survive each winter. That ice acts unlike other solids is a taken-for-granted marvel of nature—signatures of God’s creation that should amaze us.

Here was a hunk of iron acting like ice, so amazing to Elisha’s disciple that Elisha had to tell him to pick it up of the water before it drifted downstream. “So he reached out his hand and took it.” And that was that. End of story. No take home moral. No object lesson or life application. No word from the Lord. Not even a parental “now you be more careful next time.” Why did Elisha do it? Shouldn’t miraculous power be reserved for more important moments? Elisha could have pulled this one off with his own two hands. He could have taken that piece of wood and fished out the ax head. He could have ordered a group of his disciples to wade a few feet into the river. The disciple saw the splash. The ax head wasn’t going to go far from there. Making it float was almost like he was showing off. Or worse, like he was being lazy—like Samantha on some old episode of Bewitched who was too tired to do the dishes so she just twinkled her nose. Making iron float was a miracle, but it seems like a wasted miracle—so frivolous and unnecessary. What are to make of it?

The renown 19^th century English preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon once quipped, “If you’re preaching an Old Testament passage you don’t understand, get to Jesus as fast as you can.” Heeding that advice (which is warranted advice since Elisha, like all Old Testament prophets, was a foreshadow of Jesus), I wonder: among they myriad of Jesus’ own Elisha-like miracles—healing the sick, raising the dead, walking on top of water himself—did any border on the frivolous and unnecessary? And if so, would such a similar miracle shed a little light on Elisha’s?

As a matter of fact there was one. It appears in Matthew 17. Jesus’ disciple Peter gets confronted by the Temple tax collectors, a sort of ancient IRS, inquiring as to whether Jesus had paid his Temple tax. The Jerusalem Temple, the center of Jewish religious life, cost a lot to operate: sacrificial animals had to be purchased and prepared, garments bought, priests paid, the building maintained. To keep things going, Jewish law mandated that every Jewish male between the ages of 20 and 50, no matter where they lived, had to pay two drachmas in Temple tax each year—the equivalent of about two day’s wages.

Taxing people to participate in worship was not so odd. They did it for almost 150 years at my previous church in Boston. The church collected what were known as “pew taxes.” As a regular attendee, you could purchase a deed to a pew seat which was taxed annually as with any piece of real estate. The levy supported church operations and building maintenance. On the one hand, it alleviated a lot of the annual anxiety felt by the Church Finance Committee. And on the other hand, it alleviated any aggravation felt by those who entered the church only to find some unsuspecting newcomer sitting in their regular spot. If you were late and someone had your seat, you just showed them your deed and told them to move.

Jesus hadn’t been paying his Temple taxes. But rather than try to explain why, he told Peter: “Let’s not offend the religious authorities, go to the lake and throw out a line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Give it to the tax-collectors for my tax and yours.” Talk about a random command—a real head-scratcher. Peter surely wasn’t expecting that any more than Elisha’s disciple was expecting iron to float.

As with Elisha and the bobbing ax head, many discount Jesus and his aquatic ATM as a Biblical fish story—an embellishment for the sake of effect. Commentators write that what Jesus really meant was for Peter to use his career fishing skills to earn the money needed to pay their bill. After all, God only “helps those who help themselves.” Miracles are too wonderful to waste. Either that or Jesus was being facetious for the Pharisees’ sake. Since when did he not want to offend the religious authorities? He was always getting their goat.

The problem here, however, is that Jesus’ request seems pretty straightforward. And he was always serious when it came to miracles. So why use one here? Couldn’t the Lord just as easily have fished the money out of his own pocket? What not pass a plate? Or hit Matthew up for it. He was a tax collector; he had money.

Just as Elisha could have fished that ax head out of the river like any other man; Jesus could have fished money out of his pocket like any other carpenter’s son. But Elisha wasn’t just any other man, nor was Jesus just any other son. Their miracles represent divine invasions that convey what could not be otherwise known. A miracle suspends nature’s laws, which is something only God can do because the Creator is the lawmaker. Miracles defy the nature of nature but never the nature of God; they are unmistakable evidence of God.

The Bible refers to Elisha as not just any man, but as the man of God. Floating iron verifies Elisha’s true identity. What Elisha does is what God does. Elisha means “God is salvation,” and through Elisha God saved his people from a whole host of disasters which they and their leaders brought upon themselves. Jesus also means “God saves,” and through Christ God saves us too. He frees us from our sins for the sake of righteousness and life eternal. Elijah anointed Elisha with a double portion of his spirit. John the Baptist—understood as the New Testament Elijah—did the same for Jesus, anointing him with the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Elisha was the Man of God, Jesus is the Son of God. The Bible declares (in Colossians), him to be “the firstborn of all creation; in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created by him and through him and for him.”

And therefore iron can float like ice. Fish can cough up coins on command. The lame walk, the blind see, captives are set free, the lost are found, the unrighteous justified and the dead raised. That Jesus miraculously does this and more authenticates his true identity. Sure, maybe he didn’t need to rig the whole pay your tax with a tilapia thing. He could have pulled whatever money he needed out of his pocket. But the that Jesus did it like he did it proved that all of creation is his pocket. As the Psalmist sings, “In his hand are the depths of the earth and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it…” “the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim in the paths of the sea.”

Of course it is often noted that this particular miracle of Jesus is the only one where the reader is left to infer that it actually happened. No where does it say that Peter in fact took a fishing line to the lake, caught the fish, opened its mouth, extracted the exact change and paid his taxes. It was a random request; a peculiar instruction that followed a long litany of peculiar instructions already uttered by Jesus: Things like “if somebody makes you go one mile, go two,” “love your enemies,” “pray for those who hate you,” “be careful to do the good things you do in secret,” “don’t worry,” “don’t judge,” “lose your life to find it,” “take up your cross to follow.” Face to face before the one whom he confessed as the Christ, the Son of God, the bona fide Lord of heaven and earth in the flesh, Peter is told to go and do this thing he had to have considered to be completely outrageous. We’re left to wonder, does he do it just because Jesus said so?

Do you?

Numbers 20:2-13; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6 

by Daniel Harrell

We’re talking about water this fall and last Sunday I mentioned how if the earth were the size of a Honda Odyssey minivan, all of the water on the planet—oceans, ice caps and atmosphere (all the liquid, solids and vapor)—would fit into a single, half-liter bottle. What I should have said was that all the surface water would fit into that half liter bottle. Water exists in earth in a fourth form, a form so exotic that despite its abundance and importance, it almost never merits mention outside of scientific circles. This vast reservoir of water—at least as much as in all of the earth’s rivers and oceans and glaciers, and perhaps four or six or ten times that—is locked up in rock, deep inside the earth’s mantle.

Perhaps you’re thinking, this is excellent! The world’s water problems are solved! But when I say “deep inside the earth’s mantle,” I’m talking about 255 miles deep—the distance from here to Fargo. To put this into perspective, the farthest down humans have ever dug is 7.5 miles and that hole took 24 years to dig and cost millions. But even if we managed a 255 mile hole, we still couldn’t get to the water. It would take some serious heat—I’m talking volcanic heat—to pry that water loose. Volcanoes are 70 percent water. Water forces its way out of the magma from deep inside the earth; that’s why volcanoes explode.

So forget about getting water out of rocks—unless you’re Moses that is. Moses was the water master. Last Sunday we encountered him in his most famous water moment—parting the Red Sea. Granted, God did all the work, but it still made Moses look like the man. He raised his staff and cued the Lord to divide the sea and make a dry pathway for the people. It was just like God did at creation when he divided the waters into sea and sky and created dry land as habitation for his creatures. And just like with Noah too. God parted the floodwaters and dried out land for the ark. In Exodus, God took his people through the waters on dry ground, but when their enemies the Egyptians tried to cross too, God collapsed the waters and eliminated them—just as he had eliminated chaos at creation and evil with the flood. Afterwards, we read that, “The people feared the Lord and believed.”

Their fear gave way to exuberance. Moses broke out in song, as did his sister, Miriam. The entire nation celebrated their freedom from Egyptian slavery. But as they were celebrating in the desert, they ran short on water. All they had left was not fit to drink—bitter water that embittered the people. They complained against Moses, who in turn complained to God, and God showed him a piece of wood he could toss into the bitter water to make it sweet.

Turns out if you do the reverse—toss water onto wood chips—you can make motor fuel. A Georgia company reported this week it has overcome a major roadblock in turning agricultural waste into vehicle fuel with a technology that treats the waste with compressed water heated to very high temperatures. The water temperature is so high that the result is neither steam nor an ordinary liquid but water in a type known as “supercritical.” Had Moses done that in Exodus he could have driven Israel to the Promised Land. I mean, he would have needed a bus, but I digress.

Things did get supercritical two chapters later in Exodus. The people were without water again, only this time there was no bitter water to sweeten. So Moses pulled water from a rock, just like he does here in Numbers 20. In what amounts to Biblical déjà vu, we read here that there was “no water for the congregation.” By now they should have known that no water was no problem for God. And not only that, but he fed them with bread every morning from heaven, and all the quail they could eat along with plenty of other miracles. But what had God done for them lately? Here they’d run short on water again and were thirsty. And feeling entitled. And angry. And melodramatic. They griped against Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; and there’s no water to drink.”

Numbers 20 marks 39 years of griping. They could have been in the Promised Land already, but all of their whining had bought them something to whine about. God left them out in the desert to walk in circles for 40 years.

This was the beginning of year 40. Moses, old and tired, had frankly, had enough. But being obedient, and still in charge, he did what he was supposed to do whenever the people complained. He went straight to the top. He appealed to the Lord for help. God showed up in glory and told Moses to speak water out of another rock, just as he had done back in Exodus. He’d done it once he could do it again. Nothing was too hard for the Lord. So Moses took his staff and opened his mouth, but instead of speaking to the rock, he yelled at the Israelites. Four decades of griping and moaning had taken their toll. Moses snapped. “Listen, you rebels—you stubborn, ungrateful, pitiful whiners—you want water out of this rock? We’ll give you water out of this rock!” And then lifting his staff, Moses struck the rock twice. The King James says that he smote it. The indication is a violent one. Moses lost his temper. Not that it mattered. Water gushed from the rock and the people drank up. They got what they wanted.

But not Moses. Turned out his little outburst was going to cost him a trip to the Promised Land. The LORD said, “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.” It wasn’t just that he wouldn’t lead the people there—that might have been taken as good news—no, Moses was going to get left behind in the desert. Seriously? One measly misstep wipes out 40 years of dedicated, sacrificial service? A single slip-up and you miss out on the fruit of your life’s work that’s so close to you can taste it? OK, so Moses didn’t follow instructions to the letter, so he acted a little unseemly given his office, so he tried to claim a bit of personal glory, he got mad and whacked the rock, but come on, the Israelites had it coming. They deserved it, didn’t they? Certainly God couldn’t fault Moses for being angry at them.

But God didn’t fault Moses for getting angry at them. God didn’t even fault Moses losing his temper. God faults Moses for losing faith. He “didn’t believe in the Lord enough to treat him as holy before the eyes of the Israelites.” It’s hard to know what exactly was meant by this. Most interpret it as Moses giving people the wrong idea about God. But what wrong idea? They drank water from a rock! Just like before. Didn’t that kind of miracle make God look good?

Not necessarily. Page ahead to 1 Corinthians 10 where the apostle Paul identifies the rock as Christ. Not literally, mind you, but literally enough that he has Jesus walking alongside Israel in the desert all those years. He was their spiritual drink, their living water. Paul probably was thinking more about Exodus than Numbers when he wrote that. The first time water came out of a rock, the people were in the desert of Sin (definitely not a good sign). According to form, they ran out of water, complained to Moses, except that the Hebrew word used in Exodus for complain was more like the verb to sue. It meant “to legally challenge somebody’s authority.” The people sued the Lord over their water rights! Moses responded, “Are you crazy? Why do you test the Lord?” He turned to God and said, “Can you believe these people? What am I supposed to do? They’re almost ready to stone me!”

What comes next is truly remarkable. His people want to take Him to court? Fine, he’ll set it up. He tells Moses to choose some of the elders to be witnesses. Moses staff would be the gavel, the emblem of his judicial authority, as well as the means of justice. A rock was the dock—that place in criminal court where the defendant stands. And then we read the absolutely mind-blowing part. God said to Moses, “I will be standing on the rock.” What? “Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Is he saying that the people have a case? More than that. The Almighty God, Yahweh himself, in effect, says to Moses: “Hit me.” Smite me. God’s pleading guilty!

No wonder Paul sees the rock as Christ. It’s a foreshadow of the cross. As Paul would later explain to the Corinthians, “God made him who knew no sin to be our sin, so that in him we might gain his righteousness.” Moses staff smote the rock, condemned God, and sprung forth water for the people. The cross smote Christ, condemned God, and sprung forth living water for all people. Those who thirst for righteousness are finally satisfied. Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks the water I give will never be thirsty again. The water that I give will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

Clearly there’s a lot more to be said about this. But for now, as far as Moses in Numbers 20 is concerned, the point simply seems to be that Moses should have known better. God took the hit back in Exodus, but soon after he showed up at that same rock again and this time chiseled a covenant with his people in stone. As long as they kept faith, he’d keep them safe, bless them and get them home. But they kept complaining. They complained about their aching feet. They complained about the lack of variety in their menu. They complained about Aaron as a preacher. They complained about Moses’ as a leader. They complained at the preliminary reports of the Promised Land. They cheated on God with shiny idols—and the Lord punished them severely for it. Paul stresses this as a warning to the idol-loving Corinthians. But the Israelites never learned. They kept on sinning and God kept on loving. He couldn’t help it. Despite all of their infidelity, he gave them grace. He gave them water.

Was it the mercy that made Moses so mad? The Lord accused Moses of not “treating him as holy.” We often equate “holy” with “perfect,” but a better synonym is “devoted.” Deeply devoted to his people despite their disdain, God sought to demonstrate his devotion over and over again. That he would give water from a rock would remind them once again that he alone was the source of their life; who would provide for them when nothing else could. He would always keep his side of the covenant, no matter what. But Moses had had enough. He went along with the water, but he wanted Israel to feel bad about drinking it. He called them rebels and he hit the rock—his own way of indicting them for their unjust accusations and pathetic behavior. “Do you see the heartbreak you’ve brought to the Lord? Do you know how deeply you’ve disappointed Him? Here, let me show you—whack! Here’s your water. Drink up you little babies!” Moses makes God’s provision feel like punishment.

It’s like the parent who takes their daughter to the State Fair and forces her to play one of those midway games because it’s fun and you want her to have fun. But she doesn’t want to play the game even though it only involves lifting a toy duck out of a bucket. So you pick up the duck and make her pick a prize which is way too much pressure now, but you interpret it as her being ungrateful and “doesn’t she realize what a sacrifice it was to take her to the fair in the first place?” So you make her feel bad about coming by telling her that she’d better pick a prize right now or you’ll take her home instead of letting her ride the rides you’ve promised her all week, which makes her cry, and you get angry because she can’t see how much you love her.

Not that I would personally know anything about this.

It’s how plenty of people feel concerning God. Back in Boston they’d call it Catholic guilt, though it’s probably Lutheran guilt around here, or just plain old Christian guilt. God loves you because nobody else will. So you’d better learn to be grateful and behave. One wrong move and you’re toast. The poetic justice in this passage is that Moses reaps what he sows for taking the Israelites on a guilt trip. Moses will not get to cross the river. This is not good news, for Moses or for us. If the great prophet Moses can’t make it into the Promised Land, sinners like you and me are doomed. But that’s always been the case. As the apostle Paul put it elsewhere, “the paycheck for sin is death.”

And yet God does have a thing for sinners. He can’t help it. Moses died and was buried in the desert. However, many years afterward, Jesus and three of his disciples hiked up a mountain. When they reached the summit, Jesus started to glow. His face lit up like the sun and his clothes became as white as light. The disciples shielded their eyes, dazed by Jesus’ transfigured glory. It was the glory of God—just like the glory shone to Moses in the desert. The disciples took another look and realized, to their utter amazement, that Jesus was not alone! If you remember the story of the transfiguration, on one side of Jesus appeared the great prophet Elijah and there on the other side of Jesus stood… you know who. Our man Moses. “The paycheck for sin is death,” Paul wrote. “But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Exodus 14

by Daniel Harrell

As far as biblical water stories go, Moses’ parting the Red Sea ranks second only to Noah’s Ark. Of course technically, it was God who parted the water and not Moses. However, there remains a need on the part of some to minimize the Lord’s direct involvement. Oceanographer Naum Volzinger and colleagues from the St. Petersburg Institute of Oceanography recently analyzed conditions that could have made the parting of the Red Sea possible. They calculated that a wind blowing at the sustained speed of 67 miles per hour overnight could have exposed a reef existing close below the sea’s surface. The Israelites could have then fled over the pathway before the wind died down and waters rose again, blocking the way for pursuing Egyptian soldiers in their wheeled chariots. Unfortunately Dr. Volsinger does not account for the difficulty in having an entire population of men, women, children and livestock trudge across a wet sandy ridge in an unrelenting 67-mile-per-hour wind.

While I am one who would assert that a natural explanation does not negate divine involvement—seeing that I believe God to be the author of nature—I do think that in this instance, God’s purposes stretch beyond the coincidental. It’s hard to imagine that getting the Israelites across the Red Sea was merely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The sort of natural windy occurrence the oceanographers imagined, while plausible, was only a computer simulation. The wind of Exodus 14 was one of those once-for-all occurrences deliberately instigated by God. Moses stretched out his hand and on cue the LORD blew back the sea all night, dividing the waters and turning the sea into dry land. Three weeks into this sermon series on water, the language should be familiar. At creation the Lord blew back the dark waters of Genesis 1, dividing them into sea and sky and brought forth dry land as earth. With Noah, the Lord blew back the dark waters of divine judgment, having separated goodness from evil, and brought forth dry ground for a new start. In ancient cultures, deep water represented total chaos. God brought order to the chaos at creation. He turned chaos in on itself with the flood. And here in Exodus, God unleashed chaos on his enemies in order to save his people.

The Exodus serves as a template for the resurrection of Jesus—often described as the Second Exodus. On the cross, God unleashed chaos again for the sake of salvation; he defangs Satan and drowns human sin. If you’re unfamiliar with the background to the original story (or have never seen the movie), basically the ancient Israelites—descended from Abraham as the chosen people of God—were brutally enslaved to a tyrannical Egyptian dynasty set on exploitation. The Lord, cognizant of his people’s suffering, calls on Moses, a man with a million excuses, to be the hero and come to the rescue. Armed with only his shepherd’s crook, God gives Moses the power of plagues and commands him to confront Pharaoh and demand he let the people go. And just in case Pharaoh might muster a little compassion, God hardens his heart so that he would always say no. Like a wrecking ball, Moses lets loose his full arsenal on Egypt: blood, frogs, gnats, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and finally death to all first born people and animals whose doorposts failed to display lamb’s blood as sign for the angel of death to pass over. Pharaoh finally relents, only to have his heart hardened by God again. At the same time, the Lord has his people wander around aimlessly in plain sight to bait Egypt into coming after them again.

The whole thing was a set-up. The Egyptians take the bait and throw their entire army toward the Red Sea. God throws up a pillar of dark cloud to hold them back while he paves a dry path through the water. The Israelites cross over and the Egyptians, concluding perhaps that the parting sea was some freak act of nature, give chase, only to have God drop the water bomb on them. He annihilates the Egyptian army and washes their bodies ashore. The Egyptians never had a chance

Tender consciences are troubled by God flexing his muscles so unfairly. How could the Lord be so harsh? Where’s the love? Where was the mercy? On the other hand, since Israel’s brutal enslavement had gone on for 400 years, a better question might be what took God so long? The reason provided for God suckering the Egyptians into their watery grave is his intent to “gain glory for himself.” Skeptics cite this as a prime example of God being a Celestial Narcissist, so insecure in his divinity and so needy of worship that he has to bend every circumstance to his advantage for the sake of his own self-affirmation. Surely any person needing praise so badly is automatically worthy of suspicion. Likewise, if your view of God is not a particularly high one; that is, if your tendency is to see him as “the big guy in the sky” rather than the awesome, almighty Most Holy Author of the Universe who dwells in unapproachable light, then God’s demanding glory could come off sounding narcissistic.

However if God is truly God, then for him to demand glory is not about his being narcissistic. It’s about him saving your life. As the Psalmist declares, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish. Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry.

What went for trusting mortals went more for trusting idols, a huge problem in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians sported close to a hundred funky deities which vied for Israel’s affection. God’s people were constantly tempted to trust these other gods and follow them instead of the Lord. Pharaoh himself was considered descended from divinity, which fascinated some of the Israelites enough that they were willing to put up with their oppression. Being regarded as divine had to go to your head. God made sure that it went to Pharaoh’s heart too. For God to harden Pharaoh’s heart was to embolden him in his own self-delusion. Those with the audacity to assert their divinity don’t always have the courage to follow through. God made sure Pharaoh had the courage. The Egyptians knew full well that chariots and water don’t mix, but when you think you’re god, you go for it anyway—with predictable results. In humiliating Pharaoh and his army, God exposed the nonsense of their idolatry and proved himself to be Lord of All.

Ancient Egypt’s idolatry was a complex, polytheistic system of deities believed to be present in, and in control of, the forces and elements of nature. The God of the Sea, named Yam, exhibited his dramatic power in the sea’s raging waters. Given that the surface of the earth is primarily water, the power is formidable. But here’s this week’s interesting fact about the water: According to journalist Charles Fishman, if Earth were the size of a Honda Odyssey minivan, the amount of water on the planet—oceans, ice caps and atmosphere—would fit into a single, half-liter bottle of Poland Spring in one of the van’s thirteen cup holders. Put another way, if the oceans on Earth were as deep, in relative terms, as the skin on a typical apple is thick, all the land on Earth would be inundated except the planet’s tallest mountains. Pausing to appreciate how slender this film of water enveloping Earth is only makes its immense power and impact all the more dramatic.

The dramatic sea-deity Yam ruled over water and all the havoc it wreaked. However Yam was capricious deity and power-hungry. He eventually gets overthrown by Baal, the god of fertility and harvest, representing human civilization’s own gradual overtaking of nature for its own uses. Baal was a chief deity in Egyptian and Canaanite culture, and a constant temptation to Israel throughout the Old Testament, which was why the Lord kept having to send prophets to yell at them and set them straight. Thankfully, by the time they get to the New Testament, Israel had largely kicked its idolatry habit. However once Christianity emerged, Jewish Christians found themselves back in it as pagan Gentile converts imported their polytheism into church. When you’re used to hundreds of deities governing your life, how do you believe in just one?

In our own day, is hard to understand the lure of idolatry. We read all the strange mythologies and wonder what was the attraction? God no longer needs to prove his supremacy over competing deities to us since we don’t really think of there being hundreds of gods hanging around anymore.

Instead, statistician George Barna insists there are closer to 310 million deities in America, each one tailor-made to fit every individual’s needs and personality. On Facebook this week I shared a post by Congregationalist minister Lillian Daniel, who let loose a pastoral rant on the way ancient idolatry plays out in contemporary culture. She narrated a typical conversation with a fellow, who upon discovering she was a minister, described himself as “spiritual but not religious,” as if he was sharing some unique and daring revelation, a rebellion against the religious status quo. The “next thing you know,” she writes, “he’s telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet? Like people who go to church don’t see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition. Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find time-honored religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating.”

Statistician George Barna actually blames the pastors for this development. Everyone hears, “Jesus is the answer. Embrace him. Say this little Sinner’s Prayer and keep coming back. It doesn’t work. People end up bored by sermons, burned out by programs and disillusioned by church politics. Waking up tired on Sundays from demanding jobs all week, the prospect of worship provides no compelling reason to get out of their pajamas. They look at church and wonder, ‘Jesus died for this?’”

The Israelites were no doubt wondering the same thing—only applied to themselves. Exhausted, and now caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, the Israelites suffered some serious disillusionment. Why did they bother getting out of their pajamas? Where was the God they trusted? And now with the Egyptians charging at their rear, they were going to die for this? “Was it because there weren’t enough graves for us in Egypt that you had to take us out here in the wilderness to die? Didn’t we tell you, ‘Leave us alone here in Egypt—we’re better off as slaves in Egypt than as corpses in the wilderness.’” It’s a recurring theme throughout Scripture and human life. Better to be a slave to what you know than risk freedom to what you don’t. But God is setting the Israelites up too. Nothing gets your attention like pending disaster. Do-it-yourself religion is fine until your airplane hits heavy turbulence. When that happens you’d probably rather pray to a God who can actually do something.

Moses tells the people not to fear, to hang tight—God is going to do something awesome alright, right now; “Behold the salvation that the LORD will accomplish for you today; the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again! The Lord will fight for you! You need only keep still and wait upon him!” Apparently Moses, like any preacher, was starting to get a little carried away. God interrupts his potential long sermon and says—don’t tell the people to keep still! Get going! There’s an army behind you!” The Lord then moved himself in between Israel and the Egyptians—the angel of the Lord, the pillar of cloud (basically the same thing) took up the rear guard. Some wonder whether the angel of the Lord was Jesus pre-incarnated. God commanded Moses to raise his staff and bring in the Spirit (Spirit and wind are the same Hebrew word). The wind blew the sea open, and the people, to their utter amazement, saw their way through. Only God could do that.

As the Egyptians gave chase into the sea themselves, we read that the Lord “looked down upon the Egyptian army, and threw them into panic.” Trapped between the walls of the sea, the Egyptians could have attributed their fate to their own deity, the sea-god Yam. But instead they fearfully realized that Yam was no Yahweh—only the God of Israel could do this. They tried to run away, but to no avail. Justice rolled down like a river. The Israelites witnessed the Egyptians washed ashore, and they fearfully realized Yahweh to be truly God too. We read, “The people feared the Lord and believed.” You’ll often hear that the verb “to fear” in Hebrew means to “to stand in awe” or “be reverent.” You’ll hear this because you’re not supposed to be afraid of God. But not here in Exodus. Here the Israelites realized the Lord to be the one true God, and it scared the crap out of them. Sometimes that’s what it takes.

To be a Christian and to belong to a church means you don’t get to invent your own God. As Rev. Daniels writes, “We come to the humbling realization that there are some things we simply cannot do for ourselves, communities of human beings have worked together and feuded together and just goofed up together. They come together because Jesus came to live with these same types of people.” You’re stuck instead with a community of believers, religious people, that great cloud of witnesses who over thousands of years have staked their souls to the one who was nailed to a stake for them. In Christ, by the cross, God did what only God could do. He unleashed chaos for the sake of salvation; he defanged Satan and drowned human sin. He took down by evil by taking it onto himself. Justice gets done, and so does love. In what amounts to a second exodus, the Lord leads us through the waters of judgment on the dry paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. He restores our souls, such that now, even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we do not fear, for Thou art with us. And as for the resurrection, good luck doing that for yourself.

Genesis 7-8

by Daniel Harrell

Last Sunday we launched into another fall here at Colonial Church—dousing ourselves in the spirit of Jesus who flows through our congregation and spills out into the world. You’ll note my choice of verbs: launch, douse, flow, spill. They’re all water verbs. How is “launch” a water verb? Did you ever watch a space shuttle lift off? I was reading about how just before the shuttle’s rocket motors ignite, 300,000 gallons of water cascade across the base of the launch pad, at a rate of nearly a million gallons a minute. As the shuttle roars skyward, the blast from its five engines erupt onto a 2.5-million-pound water cushion. The water had nothing to do with damping the heat from the shuttle’s motors. It was a sound suppressant. The space shuttle’s rockets are so loud that without a noise-absorbing water cushion, the roar from the engines would bounce off the metal and concrete base of the launch pad and ricochet back up, ripping the spacecraft apart before it cleared the launch tower.

The water used to launch the most advanced spacecraft ever created is the same water we use to brush our teeth. Water supplies the mystical beauty of a lake, as well the delicate filigree of a snowflake—we’ll worry more about that next month. As author Charles Fishman reminds us, “Solid water tore open the steel hull of the Titanic; liquid water sank her. You need great water to make great coffee and great beer, and pretty darn good water to make good concrete.” Water is both mythic and real, monstrous and routine, spiritual and Biblical. From start to finish, water washes across the pages of Scripture—and will serve as my sermon theme between now and Christmas. Last Sunday we read how “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” but already present at the beginning was deep, dark water, signifying for ancient cultures the presence of total chaos. Onto this chaotic tide blew the wind of God, the breath with which he spoke his creative calm and made all things good.

You know, the creation picture is sort of the opposite of what you’d expect. Normally when wind blows across water it churns up rather than calms down. I was kayaking the Apostle Islands last June, and the day appeared to be tranquil enough. But once out on the lake, a sudden squall whipped the water into some terrifying chop—eliciting a small craft warning—and threatening to toss me and my small craft into the cliffs I’d paddled out to enjoy. I’ve got a big kayak, but it’s a little boat, especially on Lake Superior. I got nervous. I dug in as hard as my paddle could dig. And I did what even the most skeptical person does when in danger of deep water: I prayed. The water that threatened to capsize me was the water that saved me—the tide and wind shifted enough to blow me onto the beach. I prayed again—thanksgiving this time. My brush with disaster compelled me to purchase a commemorative T-Shirt back at the gift shop which reads, “The Lake is The Boss.”

Of course at creation, God is the Boss of the Lake—which in Genesis meant separating the waters into sky and sea—redeeming the chaos into glorious splendor, a splendor I enjoyed for the rest of my kayak trip. That redemption occurred at creation was part of God’s intent. As I suggested last Sunday, the death and resurrection of Jesus was not some emergency mop up operation forced on God by human sin as if, somehow, creation had not been good enough. The book of Revelation describes Jesus as “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” From the beginning, God has been redeeming creation and its creatures toward an ultimate future, pulling all things toward that new creation where God himself already abides. It’s a future so certain that the author of Revelation can speak of it as having already happened: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” he writes. But then he adds, “the sea was no more.” The water is gone. Lake-lovers no doubt find this terribly disappointing, but from a wider Biblical perspective, it makes perfect sense. New creation has no more chaos. No more danger. No condemnation.

Here in Genesis, however, there is plenty danger. The Lord tamed the chaotic waters in Genesis 1, but not five chapters later, deep water rises again in condemnation of all that the Lord God had made—the good creation turns in on itself. Only Noah and his ark-full of animals make it through safely. The earth succumbs to a watery madness so that a new beginning can occur.

I’m always a little surprised whenever parents show me a newborn’s nursery decorated in a Noah’s Ark theme. Don’t they love their baby? Rainbows cover the walls, chirping bird mobiles dangle over the crib—which is crafted to look like the ark itself. Cuddly stuffed animals, two of every kind, are strewn about as a jolly old Noah happily waves from the bow. I look around and thankfully there’s no Bible in sight. If it were somebody might accidentally open it and read the story. It starts in Genesis 6: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them… every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.”

We’re so accustomed to rainbows, a petting zoo of animals and a Santa Claus Noah that we forget the part about God sadly obliterating not merely the entire human race except for Noah and his family, but also every other living thing. Even if we treat the story as an allegorical moral epic—like St. Augustine did—rather that as an actual historical event, Noah’s ark is still a story that depicts God as the kind of God who would do this sort of thing—and forcing us all to ask, “why?”

Not that the wickedness of humankind isn’t great on the earth. You see the news. You read the internet. You know about the atrocities being committed in places like Syria, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Last night the murdered remains of a young California nursing student who was just going to get something from her car were found. A six-year-old Oakdale girl came home this week to find her parents and babysitter killed. A newborn was thrown into the Mississippi River and drowned. Your own families and friends betray you, you’re rejected by those you thought loved you, abused by those in power over you—and that’s just this week. We see but a small slice of the cruelty we humans inflict on each other all the time. But God sees it all. If Noah’s age was anything like our own, it’s not so hard to imagine God doing what he did. Who at the depth of sorrow and grief wouldn’t want to rid themselves of their sorrow and start over?

Now I should add that even if we can empathize, God’s sorrow is not like ours; his is never spontaneous or self-serving. Rather, godly sorrow is fueled by a passion for justice, provoked by a pity for the abused and mistreated. God’s is a sorrow that serves the cause of righteousness.

We’re told that Noah gets saved because he was righteous, a blameless man in his generation—though given his generation this may not be saying much. We also read that “he walked with God” which meant he kept faith in the Lord. And yet to look at Noah’s life is to find scant evidence of any exceptional goodness. Jewish tradition actually regards Noah as the sort of leader from whom one should learn how not to act. Noah heard God’s decree of the coming flood, yet he neither argued with God nor warned his fellow citizens. That he found favor with God anyway reminds us that any goodness we possess always comes by way of grace. That God saves even Noah gives us hope that all will not be lost to God’s condemnation of evil. Amidst the judicial flood floats a life raft of mercy.

Of course for many of us, our trouble with God bringing his torrential judgment is less about his being the kind of God to do that sort of thing, and more about why he doesn’t do it again. Amidst all the horrific evil still in the world, where is God now? Why doesn’t he hit the reset button one more time and get it right? The saddest part of the Noah story is that the flood didn’t really fix things so well. Read on in Genesis 9 and you find that Noah and his clan don’t turn out to be any better people than the Genesis 6 people for whom “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” Noah’s relations turn out to be a sordid bunch, hardly the kind of kids who’d make you want to have children of your own. It’s Noah’s children who get cursed by God, Noah’s descendents who will build the Tower of Babel, who will inhabit Sodom and Gomorrah, and who will commit every other evil that the Bible condemns—just like we do. This is the hard realization: To insist on God’s justice now is to invite our own destruction.

But this may not be such a bad thing. The floodwaters of Noah have always been understood to prefigure the waters of baptism. Baptism is not so much about having your sinful self washed clean as it is about having your sinful self killed off. Jesus referred to the cross as a baptism, and told anyone who wanted to follow him that they’d have to take up a cross too. More than a bath, baptism is a drowning—water that drowns in order to save. The apostles Peter and Paul both understood this. To the Romans, Paul wrote, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In more cryptic fashion, Peter referred to Noah’s flood as a baptism too, recognizing that the water that destroyed the earth was the same water that saved Noah; the same water, Peter wrote, that now saves us. “Noah and his family were saved through water” Peter asserts, and the preposition through is important. Noah was saved through water, that is out of the water; not by the water, but by God’s grace. St. Augustine understood the wooden ark to foreshadow the wooden cross of Jesus. God saves us through the waters of his judicious and judicial sorrow by the cross of Christ, our ark of grace.

Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr maintains how in life we each will go through deep water—a crisis, a cross, a baptism—but that if you are open to it, you will enter into a space of spiritual refreshment and renewal, into a life that you could not have imagined before. “There always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change or even understand,” the Franciscan priest explains. “Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost, a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, a disease has to be endured.” However the crisis can also be more subtle: It may be that you suddenly realize that you’ll never live the life you dreamed of living.

Crisis undoes us. It devastates us. It kills us. The flood doesn’t just flood your house—it washes out your soul. What you thought you knew about your life and faith no longer suffices for the life you are living. It is at here, as the waters rise about your neck, Father Rohr reminds us to remember two things: First, God has not abandoned you even if you are sure that he has. Every book of the Bible agrees: “the LORD your God who goes with you; he will not fail you or forsake you.” Second, you will grow much more by having done it wrong than by doing it right. I don’t think Father Rohr means that you try to do everything wrong for the sake of growth, but that trying to be right all the time never works. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, “What so often makes us liars is not what we do, but the justification we offer for what we do.” Our justifications become our self-delusions, the stories we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that we have done as well as was possible. We’ve kept all the rules—but we’ve lost all compassion. Why can’t everybody else get their act together?

Now remembering these things may be cold comfort during your crisis—when your house is flooded, who cares about spiritual growth? But the point is that later you will notice. You will wonder how you possibly could have come to where you are without all that water.

We read that God remembered Noah and the animals. “God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.” It’s a virtual redo of Genesis 1. Noah responded with worship—it’s the first time an altar is built in the Bible and the first time a burnt offering is offered. A burnt offering was the most basic of Old Testament sacrifices wherein an entire animal was consumed (This was why righteous Noah had extra animals on board). To totally burn a sacrifice was to pledge total devotion to God. To have it totally consumed was a sign of God’s total acceptance. Our text describes the aroma as pleasing to the Lord—so pleasing that God responds with his own pledge to never again curse the ground because of human evil. The evil returned to be sure, soon and often, but rather than flood the world, God sank himself. He took down evil by nailing it to a cross, suffering his own righteous sorrow against human sin; consuming himself for our sake, that the waters which rise around our necks might become, in Christ, by grace, the waters that raise us up.

Genesis 1:1-10

by Daniel Harrell

In the midst of this beautiful stretch of late summer sunshine, it’s easy to forget how 2011 has been among the most extreme years weather years in recent history. Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought fueling vast wildfires. Deadly tornadoes. Massive rivers overflowing their banks even this morning in Pennsylvania and New York. There was a billion-dollar blizzard last winter. Hurricane-triggered flooding in Vermont. And this without even mentioning bizarre earthquakes in Colorado and Virginia. The culprit in every case? Water. Water is the grease deep within the earth that lubricates tectonic plates. Water is the substance that energizes the atmosphere, moves with wind and falls as rain. Water is, quite literally, everywhere. That cold carton of milk you took out of the refrigerator this morning and set on the counter? Within a minute or two what showed up on the surface? Water.

Water is both mythic and real, monstrous and routine. It is spiritual too. So spiritual in fact that it keeps many Minnesotans away from churches all summer. As beautiful as this Meetinghouse may be, it still can’t compete with the lake. Water amuses our minds, inspires our souls, cools our bodies, quenches our thirst and infuses our language in ways that affect even your reaction to my words at this moment. Should my sermon fail to stir, what will you mutter over your pancakes and syrup? Man, was that a dry one! I should have stayed at the lake! Of course every preacher frets over preaching a dry sermon, but realistically that’s impossible for any preacher to do. This is because preachers, like all people, are made mostly of water. I weigh around 175 pounds, 105 of which happens to be liquid. That’s 12.5 gallons of homiletical hydration spewing forth from this pulpit as I speak.

Water is spiritual, and it’s Biblical too. From start to finish, water flows all across the pages of Scripture. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” but already present, it seems, was deep, dark water over which swept a wind from God. God sweeps water above and below, separating it into atmosphere and ocean. This same wind, or spirit as the Hebrew word allows, later sweeps water into a devastating judicial flood, into a divided sea for exodus, a miraculous fountain of relief in the desert, a mythical river flowing out of the Temple, wedding wine, a watery path on which Jesus walks, a stream of mercy gushing from heaven itself. Between now and Christmas I plan to wade us though these Biblical waters, trusting their power as metaphor and reality to wash us clean and to quench that thirst for righteousness by which, Jesus says, we are to be blessed.

As I begin with the beginning, I should say that I am one of those who reads Genesis 1 as more literary than literal. Given the evidence from creation itself, it’s highly unlikely that God fashioned the heavens and the earth over six 24-hour days four thousand years ago. As an ancient Hebrew book, Genesis isn’t set up to provide technical accounts of the chemical origins of the universe, nor does it try. Instead, Genesis 1 serves as a poetic preamble, a framework for divine revelation. Genesis shapes the way we understand Tabernacle and Temple, Ezekiel’s visions, John’s gospel-introduction, and Revelation’s conclusion. It’s imagery asserts God’s authority over all time and over all things along with his intention to reconcile all things in Christ. That Genesis and its reiterations are received as literary rather than literal depictions in no way diminishes their impact. To be literary is not to lie. For instance the prodigal son is true even if its not a true story.

The imagery and language of Genesis 1, are nonscientific; they offer a different kind of description of the universe in accordance with vocabulary and concerns pertinent to ancient Near Eastern cultures. These concerns could not have included those of modern science, nor of our modern scientific understanding of water’s properties. From the beginning water has existed as that wondrous molecular combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen; but to no one’s surprise, that information doesn’t show up anywhere in the Bible. Paging through Genesis 1, God’s creative activity is narrated topically instead of sequentially. Light shows up on day 1 and vegetation on day 3, but the sun doesn’t appear until day 4. In this way the creation narrative works a lot like the gospels do, focusing more on thematic unity than on a strict chronological sequence. The emphasis is on creation’s authorship and purpose (as well as its dissimilarity from the pagan creation accounts that were vying for ancient Israel’s affection).

Genesis was composed at a time when water, especially deep water, was feared as that primordial abode of terror and chaos. In ancient Babylonian and Egyptian creation myths, deep water is personified as a belligerent ocean goddess over whom the forces of good eventually prevail. In repudiating these myths, Genesis refuses to see water as personified or a competing power. In the beginning was God alone. Nevertheless, tapping into the mythic fear of deep water, Genesis portrays a deep shrouded in darkness, an earth formless and void—an obscure Hebrew idea that might be better translated as “total chaos.” This is the stage on which God acts.

The ancient Hebrews viewed dark water as ironically representing nonexistence. In direct contrast to a sinister monster, dark water symbolized chaotic nonbeing and disorder—the fertile ground from which evil emerged. Centuries later St. Augustine would argue that evil is essentially nonbeing, a parasitic power that hijacks its strength from the goodness it perverts. This might explain how that snake got into the garden. Sucking strength from its host, evil distorts justice into injustice, fidelity into infidelity, trust into distrust. The opposite of love is never hate, but indifference. We hate because we care—hate is love darkened by chaos. And yet if the Bible teaches us anything, it teaches us that the evil power we confront on earth is always a defeated power—no matter how contrary it may seem to our experience. As Psalmist sings: “the darkness is not dark to you;” O Lord, “the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” Indeed, atop Mt Sinai in that moment prior to his grand revelation to Moses, God went so far as to veil himself in darkness. This suggests to some that in Genesis 1, what looks like just another description of terrible primordial waste could in fact hint at the hidden presence of God preparing to reveal himself—something God’s spirit does so often in the dark spaces of every day life.

Thinking about Genesis and water this way, and thinking about this tenth anniversary of September 11, I couldn’t help but see connections. Today in New York City, the National 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero opens to visitors. The Memorial is comprised of two one-acre pools of dark, deep water, roughly the footprint of the twin towers. The pools are submerged thirty feet into the earth with four-sided waterfalls cascading into each pool. The deep holes are empty and void—reminiscent of the total chaos that reigned that day. The waterfalls pour inward, calling to mind both the buildings’ collapse, as well the continual tears shed over all that was lost.

I was in Boston that day, where the two planes that plowed into the World Trade Center originated. The planes were filled with Bostonians, the first with a man from our church. The phone call came late that night—a pastor needed to visit the young widow—to go and do what pastors are supposed to do. But do what? Say what? This was unprecedented. Not only had this widow lost her beloved husband, but their young son had lost his father. And like so many other widows, she was also pregnant with their second son. She was in shock and her extended family so shaken that they’d been unable to tell her everything—that it was a terror attack, that thousands had died, that the two towers fell, that there were four planes. But they also didn’t want her hearing about it from the news. So they asked me to tell her.

So I did and braced for that crisis of faith every minister confronts whenever a deluge of chaos hits: “Where was God? Why did He let this happen?” Those emotions were certainly present, but rather than push God away, this woman needed God to be close—she wanted a memorial service for her husband in church, as soon as possible, even though he didn’t attend much. Hers was a need shared by so many. We held a citywide prayer service the day after and were taken aback by the massive, anonymous and sorrowful surge that packed our large, downtown sanctuary. The same happened at every church that opened their doors. We planned the memorial service for this husband and father a few days later, and again the sanctuary was packed, surrounding the widow with hundreds of mourners, some of them strangers, trying to make sense of something that made no sense, seeking light in the darkness, creation out of the churning chaos, rescue out of the deep water.

Images of Genesis 1 were evident that day. Standing in the high pulpit, I looked out over a deeply troubled sea of grief and fear. But “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters”—translated in other Bibles as “the Spirit of God hovering over the waters”—a more hopeful image, I think, for people who feel like they’re drowning. Drowning people have no time for crises of faith. They need help and hope from God. They need air. The Hebrew word translated wind and spirit also means air, or more specifically, breath. Into the dark chaos at creation God breathed—four simple that made everything right: “Let there be light.” If darkness evokes that which is opposed to God, light is God’s salvation. “In Christ was life that was the light of all people,” we read in John’s gospel, an intentional reverberation of Genesis. Jesus is “the light who shines in the darkness, whom the darkness cannot overwhelm.”

And yet, on this tenth anniversary of 9/11, darkness still seems overwhelming. Two devastating wars. Economic recession. Persistent suspicion of anyone different. Homeland security. Terror alerts. Fractured politics. Fear for the future. Though 9/11 is a story we know by heart, its morals have been hard to hold. Boston College professor Alan Wolfe, this cynically wrote, “9/11 was this moment that we came together, and it lasted about three-and-a-half minutes. The country went from a brief moment of something like unity, to complete Balkanization, we see it in religion and in politics, like we see it in everything else.” Indeed, all those people who packed out churches after the attacks were gone by Christmas. Back to normal, just like we were ordered. And yet normal is nonexistent for the families and friends of the dead we remember this day—the passengers on the planes, those killed on the ground, the rescuers, soldiers and civilians, and (if praying for our enemies is to be obeyed) then even the deluded terrorists themselves. There is an ocean of dark water that has yet to subside.

In Genesis, God speaks light into being, but he doesn’t fully eliminate darkness—though he makes it less scary with stars. He doesn’t eliminate water either—or none of us would be here. One of the interesting facts about water: We only have this single allotment of it. No water is being created anymore, or destroyed either. Every drop on earth has been here from the start. Every drop has seen the inside of a cloud, and the inside of a volcano, the inside of a maple leaf, and the inside of a kidney, probably many times. Water is in everything and through everything, the same today, yesterday and forever. Just like Jesus—who calls himself “living water” for the world. Water that can evoke terror and chaos also sustains and gives life. Water symbolizes hope. We baptize with water, replaying over and over the hope of new creation that surfaces from the deep waters of evil, sin and death; new birth made possible by water’s cleansing power. For as long as humans have prayed, we have prayed at water places because water moves us to hope. People will pray today at the waters of the 9/11 Memorial. At Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, people will pray near the baptismal font, where there will also be on display a grim piece of twisted I-beam from the twin towers. Like many of the memorial fragments, it has “SAVE” spray painted on it, a message to salvage crews that carries a meaning more profound than they would have intended.

We do tend to think of creation as in desperate need of salvation, subject to the fall—marred and messed up by sinners. Redemption is God’s response to human evil. Jesus flies down to mop up the horrific ruin we’ve made of God’s world. In the midst we wonder how God’s perfect creation could ever go so perfectly bad. How was it that people crafted in God’s image were so easily tarnished? Was God’s good work not good enough?

Maybe instead of creation being something good that went bad, a better way to think of it is as something started as good but just not yet done; incomplete and yet still due to be finished. What if redemption was not solely a response to human evil—but the intent of the plan from the beginning? At the end of the Bible, Revelation describes Jesus as the “Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.” Redemption was in the works from the start. Rather than God shooting creation out of some cosmic cannon with a big bang, perhaps we should think of God pulling creation from the future where the Lord already abides, toward its ultimate destination of new creation—redeeming it from the beginning toward a future so certain that the author of Revelation can speak of it as having already happened: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, the first heaven and earth passed away,” he writes. What’s true for the creation is true for the creatures. In Christ we are new creations now, Paul writes, “the old is gone and the new has come.”

Dawn and I were out in California for a wedding a few months ago. Water made an appearance there in the presence of rain—something that hadn’t happened in that part of California in 130 years. While no bride wants it to rain on her wedding day, in this case it made for a more special day than it was already. Water is a special thing. Also present at the wedding was the young widow from our church in Boston. She’s remarried—to a man whose sister lost her husband on 9/11 too. Her second son was also there—he’s ten years old now of course. She has a new life. And she readily admitted it to be a good life. A clean start. A new beginning. A life for which, as hard as it’s been, she could honestly say she is thankful.

By Brian Jones
September 4, 2011
Over the past three weeks Daniel preached on the lives and ministries Leo, Luther and Lewis. Wrapping up the Lʼs, Church Fathers is a sermon series Daniel has been working on for fourteen years. Fourteen years ago I was much too young to be preaching, but I have a modest sermon series of my own going.

Even before I went to seminary I was fascinated by how Christian theology and thinking plays out in contemporary American culture, particularly how often in America spirituality is manifested in a “slogan theology” or “folk religion”, where bumper sticker slogans or platitudes can be mistaken for scriptural truth.

Back in 2009 I unintentionally began this sermon series when I preached on the phrase “What goes around comes around.” This is a commonly used phrase in pop culture and in our everyday lingo. Just the other day I heard a woman mutter “well, what goes around comes around” under her breath when she felt like someone cut in front of her in the line at Target. “What goes around comes around” isnʼt a Biblical phrase, itʼs a phrase that actually speaks to the worldview of karma. Karma the idea that if you do good things, then good things will come to you, but if you do bad things then watch out, because you might need to dodge a lightning bolt. A worldview like karma – where we can feel like we are in control of our own destiny and rewarded in a way we feel is fair – is comforting to us. Itʼs also disturbingly comforting to think our enemies will get the fair punishment we think they deserve. But luckily for us, God is a God of grace, and not a God of karma – and to paraphrase Romans 3:24 – God, in his mysterious ways, “treats us much better than we deserve.”

Just a few months ago in the second sermon in the series we dissected the common bumper sticker slogan “God helps those who help themselves.” Used widely in our culture and thought by 8 out of 10 Americans to be a phrase that actually appears in the Bible, “God helps those who help themselves” is a phrase that cannot even be loosely paraphrased using scripture. Instead, what the scriptures teach us time and time and time again is that Godʼs heart is with the helpless and God calls us – his followers – to help the helpless as well. God helps. So should we.

This brings us to this morning and the third and final installment of our slogan theology series: “God doesnʼt give you more than you can handle.” Or for you Yoda fans: “God give you more than he can handle, he does not.”

Again, this is a phrase that is widely used in culture but this exact phrase appears nowhere in the Bible. In fairness to everyone who has spoken this phrase, “God doesnʼt give you more than you can handle” does have itʼs roots in scripture as itʼs actually a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 10:13, which says “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

When I was researching how this current phrase came to be – how the context was changed and how the original verse of scripture was significantly reworded – I found that itʼs generally agreed that the culprit in the rephrasing was – wouldnʼt you know it – a preacher. We preachers are known for our one-liners and we can rarely resist an opportunity to work up a clever phrase and then repeat it over and over and over again until it inevitably ends up as a cliche.

I most recently spotted the phrase “God doesnʼt give you more than you can handle” when I was reading my twitter feed. [FIRE SLIDE ONE] When you are talking about slogans and cliches, twitter is second only to bumper stickers. Twitter is a short, quick way to communicate. Twitter allows users to post a thought, link or picture using 140 characters or less. I love twitter. I loved being able to send updates from the recent youth mission trips and, most recently, from Pyro 2. I loved being able to get updates from Anne-Marie and the Childrenʼs Ministry at Camp Pyro and from Jeff during the recent mission to Peru. I follow fellow youth ministers with twitter, I get just about all my news with twitter, clicking through the links to sites like time.com, I upload and send out pictures of my little girls to their twitter followers – which includes my mom – and I get frequent baseball and football updates so I can keep winning fantasy teams.

Twitter is wonderful for lots of things, but there are some things that twitter doesnʼt do well. Each individual tweet has a 140 character limit, which is really just a sentence and holds little room for nuance. Twitter, by itʼs very nature, is about simplifying everything. There is a risk with constantly simplifying everything. The problem isnʼt with simplicity itself. The verses of scripture that were just read could fit on a twitter line. The problem is that those verses, those simple lines, those incredibly profound lines, are set within a larger, and important, context.

There are two kinds of simplicity. Simplicity on the first side of complexity and simplicity on the far side of complexity. Simplicity on the first side of complexity is a 14-year-old student in Confirmation saying, “God wonʼt give you more than you can handle. Everything is going to be OK!” Simplicity on the far side of complexity is when my 86- year-old grandmother – who was born into the great depression, lived through World War II, and had a husband who abandoned her, penniless and alone, to raise three small girls – says “God wonʼt give you more than you can handle. Everything is going to be OK.” Same words. Through complexity that simple statement is no longer a cliche, it is Godʼs truth. Twitter, by itʼs nature prevents complexity. You arenʼt allowed to wrestle with and through things, because wrestling takes time and energy and emotion and openness and experience and suffering. Twitter is about speed, fast, now, go go go.

Now, obviously, twitter is just an example, and really this observation is about our culture and relationships in general, where the quick and the easy can hold sway over the intentional and purposeful. Slogan theology is what happens when simple statements are tossed around too easily in a community of faith. It prevents us from getting to the genuine, profound things that should be simple. Faith doesnʼt have to be complex, but we have to wrestle through it to make it our own.
So letʼs take a couple minutes to wrestle with the original verse, unpolluted by clever preachers with our slick-talking ways.

In the Apostle Paulʼs letter to the church in Corinth, Paul was addressing a group of people who were falling into temptation. Although the Corinthians were now following Jesus, some of them had become comfortable in their faith and had begun to dabble in their old ways. There were individuals in the church in Corinth who felt that the fact that they had been baptized and partaken of the Lordʼs Supper made them immune to the temptations of idol worship. Some of the Corinthians were attending meals and festivals in the temples of pagan gods, just as they had done before becoming Christians. In their view, this was merely a normal aspect of social life in their culture, not a faith issue.

If you know anything about the Apostle Paul you know that he would have none of that. Paul, when educating Christians, was very fond of teaching by giving them a little history lesson. Paul took the Corinthians back to Moses and the Exodus, and to the wilderness generations who worshipped the golden calf, even after they had experienced Godʼs mighty deliverance from slavery in Egypt. This is a story thatʼs a telling analogy for Paulʼs argument that Christians should not become implicated in idol worship. In fact, Paul explained in verse six that the purpose of the scriptural story is (literally) “that we might not desire evil as they did.” Paul continues this argument through verse 12, then picks it up again in verse 14. Of course, itʼs verse thirteen is the most familiar, having been reworded to serve generations of Christians as a word of hope in times of difficulty. But itʼs almost always cited in isolation from itʼs Corinthians context, and for good reason – itʼs difficult to see how it fits into the scheme of the present argument, especially since verse 14 follows verses 1-12 so nicely. Verse 13, standing out like a rock between the warning of 12 and the continuation of the warning in 14, functions both to continue the warning to flee from idols, but mainly to offer a strong word of assurance.

“Flee from temptation” would actually work quite well as a tweet and might come as a welcome exhortation to your twitter followers who might be drifting toward a sticky situation. It might even get a retweet, which – if you are unfamiliar with twitter verbage – is the twitter equivalent of “Amen brother!”

But the area of temptation isnʼt the context today where we typical use or hear the phrase “God doesnʼt give you more than you can handle.” Temptation is one thing… tragedy is another.

This past week I was sharing with Danielle (and with Daniel) that I had some nervousness about this sermon, a lump in my throat as I was preparing. Itʼs easy work to deconstruct something, to tear it apart. But the words “God doesnʼt give you more than you can handle” have been a source of hope and comfort for many, when exactly what they needed was a source of hope and comfort. Itʼs also been a phrase that has been used by many with the best of intentions to offer a source of hope and comfort. These words pack a lot of emotion with many. I had lunch just this week with a friend who asked me what todayʼs sermon was going to be about and when I told him he said, “You know, Iʼve always struggled with that phrase. My mom died when I was young and she suffered with mental illness. Clearly, it was more than she could handle.” The intention is to deconstruct the phrase on the first side of simplicity, and continue to honor the emotion and the experience that people hold from the far side of simplicity.
The good news is that in rethinking this little phrase of slogan theology actually takes us to a place of greater hope with an even bigger promise attached.

While the original scripture spoke specifically to the topic of temptation and our modern day paraphrased version speaks to the topic of personal perseverance through tragedies and hardships, the irony is that our modern day rephrasing could have been born in part out of temptation – the temptation of our Western culture to rely only on ourselves. If God has given us only what we theoretically should be able to handle by ourselves, then what reason do we have to rely on him? Someone shouldʼve have consulted with the makers of those F.R.O.G. bracelets. Remember those? They stood for “Fully Rely on God” and tens of thousands of them have been sold. Maybe the bracelet makers are on to something. Doesnʼt “God wonʼt give you more than you can handle” elevate in a way our self-reliance, and minimize our reliance on God?

A phrase like this becomes wildly adopted because it fits with other traditional American ways of thinking – we are encouraged to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and we are apt to use other phrases like “God helps those who help themselves.” “God doesnʼt give you more than you can handle” is also like most other bumper-sticker slogan theology in that it is a promise that appeals to my concerns about myself and my well- being, which in fairness isnʼt far from our minds when we are struggling deeply, wondering if the people around us are going to be OK.

But the truth is that over and over again in the Bible, we see men and women who are given far more than they can handle. The prophet Jeremiah was charged with preaching repentance to the people of Israel, a calling that caused him to be beaten, plotted against and rejected by everyone, even his own family. Emotionally, that was far far more than he could handle as we read in his many laments.

Job – the poster boy for having so many of lifeʼs tragedies thrown at him – was driven to his knees and instead of his friends giving him a pat on the back and telling him that “God wouldnʼt give him more than he could handle” they recommended to Job that he should just curse God and die. Those friends of his couldʼve used a dose of Minnesota Nice.
It was Jesus himself who prayed at the time when he knew his own death was imminent that if there was any other way – anything – that he was open to it.

But, in fact, it was the ministry of the Apostle Paul that was one of the more powerful examples of this truth found in scripture. In his second letter to the very same Corinthian church he writes: “Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits. Danger in the city, danger in the wilderness. In toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, am I not weak? If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”

Paul doesnʼt tell us these things to boast in how he shouldered all that suffering and adversity and took it like a man. Paul does it so that we might know that God will always give us more than we can handle. Paul boasts “of the things that show my weakness” because those things show his (and our) dependency on the power and mercy of God.

Finally, it was our hero from last week – C.S. Lewis – who struggled deeply with the loss of his wife to cancer who wrote this: “Among the huge Atlantic waves of bereavement, poverty, temptation, and reproach, we learn the power of Jehovah, because we feel the littleness of man.”

God is making it clear that we are not self-sufficient. We need not just hunker down and power through every situation. We cannot white-knuckle our way to holiness. We need God. Whereʼs my FROG bracelet?

Even though 1 Corinthians 10:13 dealt specifically with temptation, believe it or not, there are still some good words it has for us regarding our present usage as a source of hope in time of tragedy.

The first noteworthy feature of the original text is that both times the word “you” was written they were both plural. If Paul wouldʼve written in southern Greek he wouldʼve used the word “yʼall.” This means that the experience of the trial and the efforts at handling a trial are never presumed by the scriptures to be borne by an individual alone. Paulʼs assumption is that any testing you experience is never in isolation. Yʼall donʼt have to go it alone. Should we create a new tweet? “God will not test us beyond what all of us can bear together.”

Remember Paulʼs little history lesson that took us back to the exodus. The theme of deliverance should be on our minds. The promise, Godʼs promise that is still good for us today, is that with every test, the faithful, dependable God will provide an exodus – a way out – just like in olden times. Isnʼt that the sentiment that was trying to be conveyed when those words first written to the Corinthians were rephrased and spoken by us today?

In times of tragedy, hardship, and sorrow our faithful God will deliver us and provide a way through, and you should never feel like that experience must be borne alone, but instead the community should hear the call to prop one another up. While we may never fully know why challenges come our way, we can take comfort from the prophet Jeremiah, the Apostle Paul, the church father C.S. Lewis and my 86-year- old grandma, who through experience wrestled with simple, cliched words in the midst of their complex and heart-wrenching circumstances, to find a new simplicity that lived on the far side of their struggles. It was a new simplicity of community and deliverance, and a full faith and reliance in a God that loves us dearly. A loving God with outstretched arms and the power to create a universe that will walk with us through whatever trial, temptation, heartache, or tragedy we face.

Perhaps, then, the better tweet would be “God doesnʼt give us more than HE can handle.” Now retweet that to all your followers.

Amen.